The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

² The immigrant would like to add one element, the excesses of the climate, which is either much too hot or much too cold or much too wet or much too dry or even, in the case of the California coast, much too mild, a sort of meteorological Back Bay. And then—oh dear!—the insects, and the snakes, and the poison hry . . . The truth is, Nature never intended human beings to live here, and her hostility, which confined the Indian to a nomad life and forbids the white man to relax his vigilance and will for one instant, must be an important factor in determining the American character.

which, oh! a thousand times, the small substitutes, the mere multiplication of the signs of theological enterprise, in the tra­dition and on the scale of commercial and industrial enterprise, have no attenuation worth mentioning."

What in fact is missing, what has been consciously rejected, with all that such a rejection implies, is the romanitas upon which Europe was founded and which she has not ceased at­tempting to preserve. This is a point which, at the risk of becoming tedious, must be enlarged upon, since the issue be­tween America and Europe is no longer a choice between social leveling and social distinctions. The leveling is a universal and inexorable fact. Nothing can prevent the liquidation of the European nations or any other nation in the great continents, Asia, Africa, America, the liquidation of the "individual" (m the eighteenth-century liberal meaning of the word) in the collective proletariat, the liquidation of Christendom in the neutral world. From that there is no refuge anywhere. But one's final judgment of Europe and America depends, it seems to me, upon whether one thinks that America Cor America as a symbol) is right to reject romanitas or that Europe is right in trying to find new forms of it suited to the "democratized" so­cieties of our age.

The fundamental presupposition of romanitas, secular or sa­cred, is that virtue is prior to liberty, i.e., what matters most is that people should think and act rightly; of course it is prefer­able that they should do so consciously of their own free will, but if they cannot or will not, they must be made to, the majority by the spiritual pressure of education and tradition, the minority by physical coercion, for liberty to act wrongly is not liberty but license. The antagonistic presupposition, which is not peculiar to America and would probably not be accepted by many Americans, but for which this country has come, symbolically, to stand, is that liberty is prior to virtue, i.e., liberty cannot be distinguished from license, for freedom of choice is neither good nor bad but the human prerequisite without which virtue and vice have no meaning. Virtue is, of course, preferable to vice, but to choose vice is preferable to having virtue chosen for one.

To those who make the first presupposition, both State and Church have the same positive moral function; to those who make the second, their functions differ: the function of the State becomes a negative one—to prevent the will of the strong from interfering with the will of the weak, or the wills of the weak with one another, even if the strong should be in the right and the weak in the wrong—and the Church, whether Catholic or Protestant, divorced from the State, becomes a wit­ness, an offered opportunity, a community of converts. The real issue has been obscured, for both sides, by the historical struggle for social equality which made liberty seem the virtue —or license the vice—of which equality was the prized or detested precondition. This was natural since, when the strug­gle began, the most glaring cause of lack of liberty was the privileged position of the few and the unprivileged position of the many, so that a blow struck for equality was, in most cases, at the same time a blow struck for liberty, but the assumed order of priority was false all the same. The possibility that de Tocqueville foresaw from an inspection of America in 1830, has become a dreadful reality in the Europe of 1946, namely, that romanitas is perfectly capable of adapting itself to an egalitarian and untraditional society; it can even drop absolute values and replace the priest by the social engineer without violating its essential nature (which is and always was not Christian but Manichean). And it was from America, the first egalitarian society, that it learned how to adapt itself. For in­stance, it took the technique of mass advertising, eliminated the competitive element and changed the sales object from breakfast foods to political passions; it took the egalitarian sub­stitute for tradition—fashion—and translated it from the put­ting over of best sellers and evening frocks to the selling of an ever-switching party line; it took the extra-legal vigilantes and put them into official uniforms; it took the inert evil of race prejudice and made it a dynamic evil. An America which does not realize the difference between equality and liberty is in danger, for, start with equality in order to arrive at liberty and the moment you come to a situation where inequality is or seems to you, rightly or wrongly, a stubborn fact, you "will come to grief. For instance, the unequal distribution of intellectual gifts is a fact; since they refuse to face it, the institutions of Higher Learning in America cannot decide whether they are to be Liberal Arts Colleges for the excep­tional few or vocational schools for the average many, and so fail to do their duty by either. On the other, more sinister, hand, the Southerner, rightly or wrongly, believes that the Negro is his inferior; by putting equality before liberty, he then refuses him the most elementary human liberties, for example, the educational and economic liberties that are the only means by which the Negro could possibly become the equal of the white, so that the latter can never be proven mistaken.

Democratic snobbery or race prejudice is uglier than the old aristocratic snobbery because the included are relatively so many and the excluded relatively so few. The exclusive- ness, for instance, of Baron de Charlus is forgivable and even charming. If Charlus will speak to only half a dozen people, it cannot be supposed that the millions suffer severely from being unable to speak to Charlus; his behavior is frankly irra­tional, a personal act from which, if anyone suffers, it is only himself. The exclusiveness of the American Country Club —I cannot share James' pleasure in that institution—is both inexcusable and vulgar, for, since it purports to be democratic, its exclusion of Jews is a contradiction for which it has to invent dishonest rationalizations.

As the issue between virtue first and liberty first becomes clearer, so does the realization that the cost to any society that accepts the latter is extremely high, and to some may seem prohibitive. One can no longer make the task look easier than it is by pretending, as the liberals of the Enlightenment be­lieved, that men are naturally good. No, it is just as true as it ever was that man is bom in sin, that the majority are al­ways, relatively, in the wrong, the minority sometimes, rela­tively, in the right (every one, of course, is free at any time to belong to either), and all, before God, absolutely in the wrong, that all of the people some of the time and some of the people most of the time will abuse their liberty and treat it as the license of an escaped, slave. But if the principle is accepted, it means accepting this: it means accepting a State that, in comparison to its Roman rival, is dangerously weak Cthough realizing that, since people will never cease trying to interfere with the liberties of others in pursuing their own, the State can never wither aw^Tay. Tyranny today, anarchy tomorrow is a Neo-Roman daydream); it means accepting a "Society," in the collective inclusive sense, that is as neutral to values (liberty is not a value but the ground of value) as the "nature" of physics; it means accepting an educational system in which, in spite of the fact that authority is essential to the growth of the individual who is lost without it, the re­sponsibility for recognizing authority is laid on the pupil; it means accepting the impossibility of any "official" or "public" art; and, for the individual, it means accepting the lot of the Wandering Jew, i.e., the loneliness and anxiety of having to choose himself, his faith, his vocation, his tastes. The Margin is a hard taskmaster; it says to the individual: "It's no good your running to me and asking me to make you into someone. You must choose. I won't try to prevent your choice, but I can't and won't help you make it. If you try to put your trust in me, in public opinion, you will become, not someone but no one, a neuter atom of the public."

If one compares Americans with Europeans, one might say, crudely and too tidily, that the mediocre American is pos­sessed by the Present and the mediocre European is possessed by the Past. The task of overcoming mediocrity, that is, of learning to possess instead of being possessed, is thus different in each case, for the American has to make the Present his present, and the European the Past his past. There are two ways of taking possession of the Present: one is with the help of the Comic or Ironic spirit. Hence the superiority of Ameri­can (and Yiddish) humor. The other way is to choose a Past, i.e., to go physically or in the spirit to Europe. James' own explanation of his migration—

To make so much money that you won't, that you don't 'mind,' don't mind anything—that is absolutely, I think,

the main American formula. Thus your making no money—or so little that it passes there for none—and being thereby distinctly reduced to minding, amounts to your being reduced to the knowledge that America is no place for you. . . . The withdrawal of the considerable group of the pecuniarily disqualified seems, for the present, an assured movement; there will always be scat­tered individuals condemned to mind on a scale beyond anv scale of making—

seems to me only partly true; better T. S. Eliot's observation in his essay on James:

It is the final consummation of an American to become, not an Englishman, but a European—something no born Englishman, no person of European nationality can be­come.

James wrote a short story, "The Great Good Place," which has been praised by Mr. Fadiman and condemned by Mr. Mat- thiessen, in both instances, I think, for the wrong reason, for both take it literally. The former says: "The Place is what our civilization could be. ... It is a hotel without noise, a club without newspapers. You even have to pay for service." If this were true, then the latter would be quite right to com­plain, as he does, that it is the vulgar daydream of a rich bourgeois intellectual. I believe, however, that, in his own discreet way, James is writing a religious parable, that is, he is not describing some social Utopia, but a spiritual state which is achievable by the individual now, that the club is a symbol of this state—not its cause, and the momey a symbol of the sacrifice and suffering demanded to attain and preserve it. Anyway, the story contains a passage of dialogue which seems relevant to The American Scene.

'Every man must arrive by himself and on his own feet—isn't that so? We're Brothers here for the time as in a great monastery, and we immediately think of each other and recognize each other as such: but we must have first got here as we can, and we meet after long journeys by complicated ways.'

'Where is it?'

'I shouldn't be surprised if it were much nearer than one ever suspected.'

'Nearer "town," do you mean?'

'Nearer everything—nearer everyone.'

Yes. Nearer everything. Nearer than James himself, perhaps, suspected, to the "hereditary thinness" of the American Mar­gin, to "the packed and hoisted basket" and "the torture rooms of the living idiom," nearer to the unspeakable juke­boxes, the horrible Rockettes and the insane salads, nearer to the anonymous countryside littered with heterogeneous dreck and the synonymous cities besotted with electric signs, nearer to radio commercials and congressional oratory and Hollywood Christianity, nearer to all the "democratic" lusts and licenses, without which, perhaps, the analyst and the immigrant alike would never understand by contrast the nature of the Good Place nor desire it with sufficient despera­tion to stand a chance of arriving.

POSTSCRIPT: ROME V. MONTICELLO

Of course, neither the Roman nor the Liberal presupposition is wholly true, for both represent an abstraction from his­torical reality.

If we consider human relations purely objectively, in abstrac­tion from the human beings who enter into them, then the moral problem is of right or wrong action and the problem of choice is irrelevant; if we consider human beings purely subjectively, in abstraction from their relations to each other, the moral problem is one of liberty or slavery.

In everyday life we instinctively adopt the Roman position in relation to strangers and the Liberal position in relation to our friends. If a stranger forges my name to a check, I do not ask if he had an unhappy childhood, I call the police; if a friend does the same thing, I ask myself what can be the matter with him and the matter with me, that he should so violate our friendship.

The Roman can show that, at any given time, there is always a class, e.g., children below a certain age, and some individ­uals, e.g., criminals and lunatics whose inability or refusal to rule themselves makes them a menace to others and whose freedom therefore must be to some degree restrained. The Liberal, on the other hand, can show that a hard and fast division between those who cannot rule themselves and those who can is false. The newborn baby has traces of the capacity to rule itself and the wisest and best man cannot rule himself perfecdy. Further, in the wisest ruler there remain traces of selfish passion in his relation to those whom he rules. In so far as he enjoys ruling others—and there always is an element of pleasure in so doing—he must desire that there remain people who cannot rule themselves, that his attempt to educate them to freedom will fail.

Toilet training, for example, would seem at first sight a case in which the Roman position was unassailable; no baby is born in control of his reflexes and no sane adult regards the conditioned control of his reflexes as a mistake or consciously rebels. Yet psychologists have been able to demonstrate that even here, the end of right action cannot be separated from the means of inculcation, that a taste for power, impatience, or even mere ignorance of the right means, can violate the traces of free will already present in the baby with deleterious effects in later life.

The Roman must concede this but then correct the tendency of the Liberal to abandon all conditioning educational tech­niques in favor of a mixture of rational explanation and learning by trial and error. For example, no free exercise of the human mind is possible until man has learned to exclude the irrelevant distractions of his immediate environment and concentrate on the problem he is attacking, or until he has learned to be truthful, to subordinate his desires to what is the case; it is only when concentration and truthfulness have become second nature to him that he will listen to reason or recognize an error as an error.

In its justifiable reaction against the mechanical learning by rote of, say, mathematical operations, progressive educa­tion is tending to carry its distaste for conditioning and au­thority into a sphere where it is fundamental, and threatening to produce a generation which may not think mechanically but only because it cannot think at all; it has never learned how.

The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as is apt to happen when these are abandoned, of race, but of age. In a democracy it is more, not less, important than in hierarchical and static societies that a distance should be kept between the young and the adult, the adult and the old: it is, I fear, Utopian to hope for them, but what the United States needs are pubertv initiation rites and a council of elders.

RED RIBBON ON A WHITE HORSE

"Mowing hay by hand! Bless their hearts!" An American matron in the train

between Bologna and Florence

Reading Miss Yezierska's book¹ sets me thinking again about that famous and curious statement in the Preamble to the Constitution about the self-evident right of all men to "the pursuit of happiness," for I have read few accounts of such a pursuit so truthful and moving as hers.

To be happy means to be free, not from pain or fear, but from care or anxiety. A man is so free when i) he knows what he desires and what he desires is real and not fantastic. A desire is real when the possibility of satisfaction exists for the individual who entertains it and the existence of such a possibility depends, first, on his present historical and

¹ Anzia Yezierska, Red Ribbon cm a White Horse, Scribner's. 1950.

social situation—a desire for a Cadillac which may be real for a prosperous American businessman would be fantastic for a Chinese peasant—and, secondly, on his natural endowment as an individual—for a girl with one eye to desire to be kept by a millionaire would be fantastic, for a girl with two beautiful ones it may not. To say that the satisfaction of a desire is possible does not mean that it is certain but that, if the desire is not satisfied, a definite and meaningful reason can be given. Thus, if the American businessman fails to get the Cadillac he desires and asks himself, "Why?" he can give a sensible answer like, "My wife had to have an emer­gency operation which took my savings"; but if the Chinese peasant asks, "Why cannot I buy a Cadillac?" there are an infinite number of reasons which can only be summed up in the quite irrational answer, "Because I am I." The business­man suffers disappointment or pain but does not become un­happy; the peasant, unless he dismisses his desire as fantastic, becomes unhappy because to question his lack of satisfaction is to question the value of his existence.

So long as it is a matter of immediate material goods, few sane individuals cherish fantastic desires after the age of puberty, but there are desires for spiritual goods which are much more treacherous, e.g., the desire to find a vocation in life, to have a dedicated history. "What do I want to be? A writer? A chemist? A priest?" Since I am concerned not with any immediate objective good but with pledging the whole of my unknown future in advance, the chances of self-deception are much greater because it will be years before I can be certain whether my choice is real or fantastic. Nor can any outsider make the decision for me; he can only put questions to me which make me more aware of what my decision involves.

Miss Yezierska's book is an account of her efforts to discard fantastic desires and find real ones, both material and spiritual.

She began life in a Polish ghetto, i.e., in the bottom layer of the stratified European heap. In the more advanced coun­tries of Europe, like England, it had become possible for a talented individual to rise a class, a generation, but in Russia, above all for a Jew, it was still quite impossible; if once one had been bom in the ghetto, then in the ghetto one would die. For its inhabitants extreme poverty and constant fear of a pogrom were normal, and even so humble a desire as the wish to eat white bread was fantastic. So it had been for centuries until, suddenly, a possibility of escape was opened—immigra­tion to America. What America would provide positively in place of the ghetto remained to be seen, but at least it would be different and any sufferings she might inflict would, at the very least, not be worse.

So Miss Yezierska and her family came and found them­selves on the Lower East Side. Here was poverty still but less absolute, exploitation but the possibility of one day becoming an exploiter, racial discrimination but no pogroms. Was their new condition an improvement on their former one? It was hard to be certain. Where poverty is accepted as normal and permanent, the poor develop a certain style of living which extracts the maximum comfort from the minimum materials, but where poverty is held to be temporary or accidental, the preoccupation with escape leaves no time for such amenities; every European visitor to the States, I think, receives the im­pression that nowhere else in the world is real poverty—ad­mittedly, rarer here than anywhere else—so cheerless, sordid and destitute of all grace.

Moreover, in the "bad old days" of which Miss Yezierska writes—a more lively social conscience and a slackening of the immigrant stream have largely put a stop to it—in no Euro­pean country, it seems, were the very poor treated with such contempt. In Europe the rich man and the poor man were thought of as being two different kinds of men; the poor man might be an inferior kind but he was a man: but here the poor man was not, as such, a man, but a person in a state of poverty from which, if he were a real man, he would presendy extri­cate himself. The newly arriving poor, to judge from Miss Yezderska's description of the sweatshop, were treated by their predecessors, it seems, like freshmen by upperclassmen, i.e., subjected to a process of "hazing" so as to toughen their char­acter and stiffen their determination to rise to a position of immunity.

For the older generation particularly, who, in any case, had usually immigrated for the sake of their children, not of them­selves,' the new life often seemed only a little better materially, and spiritually very much worse. The fellowship of suffering lasts only so long as none of the sufferers can escape. Open a door through which many but probably not all can escape one at a time and the neighborly community may disintegrate, all too easily, into a stampeding crowd. Those who had learned how to be happy even in prison and could neither understand nor desire another life stood abandoned, watching the stam­pede with bewilderment and horror.

Some, like Boruch Shlomoi Mayer, simply wanted to go back:

To me, America is a worse Goluth than Poland. The ukases and pogroms from the Czar, all the killings that could not kill us gave us the strength to live with God. Learning was learning—dearer than gold. . . . But here in New York, the synagogues are in the hands of godless lumps of flesh. A butcher, a grocer, any moneymaker could buy himself into a president of a synagogue. With all that was bad under the Czar, the synagogue was still God's light in time of darkness. Better to die there than to live here.. . .

Others continued to live their old life with uncompromising indifference to the new world. Miss Yezierska's father, for in­stance, had a vocation, the study of the Torah, which involved his being supported by his wife and children. He had expected them to do so in Plinsk, he expected them to continue doing so in New York. But what they had accepted in Poland as an extra burden, worth bearing for the honor in which a learned and holy man was held by the community, was bound to seem intolerable in America, where not only was a nonearner re­garded as an idler but also the possibility for the family of acquiring status existed in proportion to their earning capacity.

His daughter, however, as she later realized, was more like him than either of them at the time could perceive. Had she been less like him, had she simply desired money and a good marriage, there would have been less friction between them but she, too, was seeking for a dedicated life of her own, which in his eyes was impious, for all vocations but one were for men only.

"A woman alone, not a wife and not a mother, has no existence." She, however, wanted a vocation all to herself and thought she had found it in writing. She began, as she tells us, with the hope that "by writing out what I don't know and can't understand, it would stop hurting me." At the same time, of course, she wanted money to satisfy her needs. This is any artist's eternal problem, that he needs money as a man but works for love. Even in the case of the most popular writer, money is not the purpose for which he writes, though popu­larity may be.

So she begins; she writes a book, Hungry Hearts, about the life of a poor immigrant, which is well reviewed but does not sell; then, suddenly, the American Fairy—whether she is a good or wicked fairy, who knows?—waves her hand and she is transported in an instant from Hester Street to Hollywood; from one day to the next, that is, suffering is abolished for her. How does she feel? More unhappy than she has ever been in her life. To have the desires of the poor and be transferred in a twinkling of an eye to a w^rorld which can only be real for those who have the desires of the rich is to be plunged into the severest anxiety. The foreshortening of time which is proper to a dream or a fairy story is a nightmare in actual life.

Further, to be called to Hollywood is not like winning a fortune in the Calcutta sweepstakes; money is showered upon one because it is believed that one is a valuable piece of prop­erty out of which much larger sums can be made. For a writer this is only bearable if he knows exacdy what he wants to write and if what he can write happens to pay off the investors as they expect. Miss Yezierska was too young to be the former and, by snatching her away from Hester Street and the only experiences about which she knew, the film magnates effec­tively destroyed the possibility that their expensive goose might lay another golden egg. In fact, they gave it such a fright that it stopped laying altogether.

The sudden paralysis or drying up of the creative power occurs to artists everywhere but nowhere, perhaps, more fre­quently than in America; nowhere else are there so many writers who produced one or two books in their youth and then nothing. I think one reason for this may be the domi­nance of the competitive spirit in the American ethos. A mate­rial good like a washing machine is not a unique good but one example of a kind of good; accordingly one washing machine can be compared with another and judged better or worse. The best, indeed the only, way to stimulate the production of better washing machines is by competition. But a work of art is not a good of a certain kind but a unique good so that, strictly speaking, no work of art is comparable to another. An inferior washing machine is preferable to no washing machine at all, but a work of art is either acceptable, whatever its faults, to the individual who encounters it or unacceptable, whatever its merits. The writer who allows himself to become infected by the competitive spirit proper to the production of material goods so that, instead of trying to write his book, he tries to write one which is better than somebody else's book is in danger of trying to write the absolute masterpiece which will eliminate all competition once and for all and, since this task is totally unreal, his creative powers cannot relate to it, and the result is sterility.

In other and more static societies than in the United States an individual derives much of his sense of identity and value from his life-membership in a class—the particular class is not important—from which neither success nor failure, unless very spectacular, can oust him, but, in a society where any status is temporary and any variation in the individual's achievement alters it, his sense of his personal value must depend—unless he is a religious man—largely upon what he achieves: the more successful he is, the nearer he comes to the ideal good of absolute certainty as to his value; the less success­ful he is, the nearer he comes to the abyss of nonentity.

With the coming of the depression Miss Yezierska ceased to be a solitary failure and became one of millions who could not be called failures, because the positions in which they could succeed or fail no longer existed. It was surely the height of Irony that, in a country where the proof of one's importance had been that one was rich and popular, people should sud­denly, in order to prove that they were important enough to eat, have to go to elaborate lengths to establish that they were penniless and friendless.

The Aits Project of the W.P.A. was, perhaps, one of the noblest and most absurd undertakings ever attempted by any state. Noble because no other state has ever cared whether its artists as a group lived or died; other governments have hired certain individual artists to glorify their operations and have even granted a small pension from time to time to some artist with fame or influence, but to consider, in a time of general distress, starving artists as artists and not simply as paupers is unique to the Roosevelt administration. Yet absurd, because a state can only function bureaucratically and impersonally— it has to assume that every member of a class is equivalent or comparable to every other member—but even,' artist, good or bad, is a member of a class of one. You can collect fifty unem­ployed plumbers, test them to eliminate the unemployable, and set the remainder to work on whatever plumbing jobs you can find, but if you collect fifty unemployed writers, ex-profes­sors, New England spinsters, radicals, Bohemians, etc., there is no test of their abilities which applies fairly to them all and no literary task you can devise which can be properly done by even a minority of them. While only the laziest and most inefficient of your plumbers will let you down, because the jobs you give them are the jobs for which they have been trained and regard as theirs, only the writers with the strictest sense of moral, as distinct from professional, duty will fail to cheat you if, as must almost inevitably be the case, the literary job you offer them is one in which they take no interest, not because writers are intrinsically lazier or more dishonest than plumbers, but because they can see no sense in what you are asking them to do.

It is easy for the accountant to frown on the W.P.A. for its inefficiency and for the artists to sneer at it for its bureaucracy, but the fact remains that, thanks to it, a number of young artists of talent were enabled, at a very critical time in their lives, to get started upon their creative careers. As for the rest, the executive might just as well have heen honest—and I dare say would have been glad to—given them their weekly checks and sent them home, but the legislature which could endure such honesty could exist only in heaven.

Among her companions in poverty and comedy, Miss Yezierska felt once more to some degree that happiness of "belonging" which years before she had felt in Hester Street, though only she realized this after it was over. But belonging to some degree is not enough; one must belong completely or the feeling soon withers. Once again the lack of a common mem­ory of the past and a common anticipation of the future was a fatal barrier, not only for her but for most of her fellows.

The word "home" raised a smile in us all three,

And one repeated it, smiling just so

That all knew what he meant and none would say,

Between three counties far apart that lay

We were divided and looked strangely each

At the other, and we knew we were not friends

But fellows in a union that ends

With the necessity for it, as it ought.

(edwabjd thomas.)

No, the accidental community of suffering was not the clue to happiness and she had to look further.

Miss Yezierska's autobiography is, literally, the story of an early twentieth-century immigrant, but it has a deeper and more general significance today when, figuratively, the immi­grant is coming more and more to stand as the symbol for Everyman, as the natural and unconscious community of tradi­tion rapidly disappears from the earth.

POSTSCRIPT: THE ALMIGHTY DOLLAR

Political and technological developments are rapidly obliter­ating all cultural differences and it is possible that, in a not remote future, it will be impossible to distinguish human beings living on one area of the earth's surface from those living on any other, but our different pasts have not yet been completely erased and cultural differences are still perceptible. The most striking difference between an American and a European is the difference in their attitudes towards money. Every European knows, as a matter of historical fact, that, in Europe, wealth could only be acquired at the expense of other human beings, either by conquering them or by exploiting their labor in factories. Further, even after the Industrial Revolution began, the number of persons who could rise from poverty to wealth was small; the vast majority took it for granted that they would not be much richer nor poorer than their fathers. In consequence, no European associates wealth with personal merit or poverty with personal failure.

To a European, money means power, the freedom to do as he likes, which also means that, consciously or unconsciously, he says: "I want to have as much money as possible myself and others to have as little money as possible."

In the United States, wealth was also acquired by stealing, but the real exploited victim was not a human being but poor Mother Earth and her creatures who were ruthlessly plun­dered. It is true that the Indians were expropriated or ex­terminated, hut this was not, as it had always been in Europe, a matter of the conqueror seizing the wealth of the con­quered, for the Indian had never realized the potential riches of his country. It is also true that, in the Southern states, men lived on the labor of slaves, but slave labor did not make them fortunes; what made slavery in the South all the more in­excusable was that, in addition to being morally wicked, it didn't even pay off handsomely.

Thanks to the natural resources of the country, every American, until quite recently, could reasonably look forward to making more money than his father, so that, if he made less, the fault must be his; he was either lazy or inefficient. What an American values, therefore, is not the possession of money as such, but his power to make it as a proof of his manhood; once he has proved himself by making it, it has served its function and can be lost or given away. In no society in history have rich men given away so large a part of their fortunes. A poor American feels guilty at being poor, but less guilty than an American rentier who has inherited wealth but is doing nothing to increase it; what can the latter do but take to drink and psychoanalysis?

In the Fifth Circle on the Mount of Purgatory, I do not think that many Americans will be found among the Avaricious; but I suspect that the Prodigals may be almost an American colony. The great vice of Americans is not materialism but a lack of respect for matter.

ROBERT FROST

But Islands of the Blessed, bless you son, I never came upon a blessed one.

If asked who said Beauty is Truth, Truth BeautyI, a great many readers would answer "Keats." But Keats said nothing of the sort. It is what he said the Grecian Urn said, his de­scription and criticism of a certain kind of work of art, the kind from which the evils and problems of this life, the "heart high sorrowful and cloyed," are deliberately excluded. The Urn, for example, depicts, among other beautiful sights, the citadel of a hill town; it does not depict warfare, the evil which makes the citadel necessary.

Art arises out of our desire for both beauty and truth and our knowledge that they are not identical. One might say that every poem shows some sign of a rivalry between Ariel and Prospero; in every good poem their relation is more or less happy, but it is never without its tensions. The Grecian Urn states Ariel's position; Prospero's has been equally suc­cinctly stated by Dr. Johnson: The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it.

We want a poem to be beautiful, that is to say, a verbal earthly paradise, a timeless world of pure play, which gives us delight precisely because of its contrast to our historical existence with all its insoluble problems and inescapable suffering; at the same time we want a poem to be true, that is to say, to provide us with some kind of revelation about our life which will show us what life is really like and free us from self-enchantment and deception, and a poet cannot bring us any truth without introducing into his poetry the problematic, the painful, the disorderly, the ugly. Though every poem involves some degree of collaboration between Ariel and Prospero, the role of each varies in importance from one poem to another: it is usually possible to say of a poem and, sometimes, of the whole output of a poet, that it is Ariel-dominated or Prosper o-dom in a ted.

Hot sun, cool fire, tempered with sweet air, Black shade, fair nurse, shadow my white hair: Shine, sun; burn, fire; breathe, air, and ease me; Black shade, fair nurse, shroud me and please me: Shadow, my sweet nurse, keep me from burning, Make not my glad cause, cause for mourning, Let not my beauty's fire Inflame unstaid desire, Nor pierce any bright eye That wandereth lighdy.

(george peele, "Bathsabe's Song.")

The road at the top of the rise Seems to come to an end And take off into the skies. So at a distant bend

It seems to go into a wood, The place of standing still As long as the trees have stood. But say what Fancy will,

The mineral drops that explode To drive my ton of car Are limited to the road. They deal with the near and far,

And have almost nothing to do With the absolute flight and rest The universal blue And local green suggest.

(robert frost,

"The Middleness of the Road.")

Both poems are written in the first person singular, but the Peele-Bathsabe I is very different from the Frost I. The first seems anonymous, hardly more than a grammatical form; one cannot imagine meeting Bathsabe at a dinner party. The second I names a historical individual in a specific situation —he is driving an automobile in a certain kind of landscape.

Take away what Bathsabe says and she vanishes, for what she says does not seem to be a response to any situation or event. If one asks what her song is about, one cannot give a specific answer, only a vague one:—a beautiful young girl, any beautiful girl, on any sunny morning, half-awake and half-asleep, is reflecting on her beauty with a mixture of self-admiration and pleasing fear, pleasing because she is unaware of any real danger; a girl who was really afraid of a Peeping Tom would sing very differendy. If one tries to explain why one likes the song, or any poem of this kind, one finds oneself talking about language, the handling of the rhythm, the pattern of vowels and consonants, the placing of caesuras, epanorthosis, etc.

Frost's poem, on the other hand, is clearly a response to an experience which preceded any words and without which the poem could not have come into being, for the purpose of the poem is to define that experience and draw wisdom from it. Though the beautiful verbal element is not absent—it is a poem, not a passage of informative prose—this is subordinate in importance to the truth of what it says.

If someone suddenly asks me to give him an example of good poetry, it is probably a poem of the Peele sort which will immediately come to my mind: but if I am in a state of emotional excitement, be it joy or grief, and try to think of a poem which is relevant and illuminating to my condition, it is a poem of the Frost sort which I shall be most likely to recall.

Ariel, as Shakespeare has told us, has no passions. That is his glory and his limitation. The earthly paradise is a beautiful place but nothing of serious importance can occur in it.

An anthology selected by Ariel, including only poems like the Eclogues of Vergil, Las Soledades of Gongora and poets like Campion, Herrick, Mallarme, would, in the long run, repel us by its narrowness and monotony of feeling: for Ariel's other name is Narcissus.

It can happen that a poem which, when written, was Pros- pero-dominated, becomes an Ariel poem for later generations. The nursery rhyme I will sing you One O may very well originally have been a mnemonic rhyme for teaching sacred lore of the highest importance. The sign that, for us, it has become an Ariel poem is that we have no curiosity about the various persons it refers to: it is as anthropologists not as readers of poetry that we ask who the lily-white boys really were. On the other hand, anything we can learn about the persons whom Dante introduces into The THvine Comedy, contributes to our appreciation of his poem.

It is also possible for a poet himself to be mistaken as to the kind of poem he is writing. For example, at first reading, Lycidas seems to be by Prospero, for it purports to deal with the most serious matters possible—death, grief, sin, resurrec­tion. But I believe this to be an illusion. On closer inspection, it seems to me that only the robes are Prospero's and that Ariel has dressed up in them for fun, so that it is as irrelevant to ask, "Who is the Pilot of the Galilean Lake?" as it is to ask, "Who is the Pobble who has no toes?" and He who walks the waves is merely an Arcadian shepherd whose name hap­pens to be Christ. If hycidas is read in this way, as if it were a poem by Edward Lear, then it seems to me one of the most beautiful poems in the English language: if, however, it is read as the Prospero poem it apparendy claims to be, then it must be condemned, as Dr. Johnson condemned it, for being unfeeling and frivolous, since one expects wisdom and revela­tion and it provides neither.

The Ariel-dominated poet has one great advantage; he can only fail in one way—his poem may be trivial. The worst one can say of one of his poems is that it needn't have been written. But the Prospero-dominated poet can fail in a number of different ways. Of all English poets, Wordsworth is perhaps the one with the least element of Ariel that is compatible with being a poet at all, and so provides the best examples of what happens when Prospero tries to write entirely by himself.

The Bird and Cage they both were his:

'Twas my Son's bird: and neat and trim

He kept it; many voyages

This singing bird has gone with him:

When last he sailed he left the bird behind;

As it might be, perhaps from bodings in his mind.

Reading such a passage, one exclaims, "The man can't write,"" which is something that can never be said about Ariel; when Ariel can't write, he doesn't. But Prospero is capable of graver errors than just being ridiculous; since he is trying to say something which is true, if he fails, the result can be worse than trivial. It can be false, compelling the reader to say, not "This poem need not have been written," but "This poem should not have been written."

Both in theory and practice Frost is a Prospero-dominated poet. In the preface to his Collected Poems, he writes:

The sound is the gold in the ore. Then we will have the sound out alone and dispense with the inessential. We do till we make the dik:overy that the object in writing poetry is to make all poems sound as different as possible from each other, and the resources for that of vowels, consonants, punctuation, syntax, words, sen­tences, meter are not enough. We need the help of con­text—meaning—subject matter. . . . And we are back in poetry as merely one more art of having something to say, sound or unsound. Probably better if sound, because deeper and from wider experience. [A poem] begins in delight and ends in wisdom ... a clarification of life— not necessarily a great clarification such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against con­fusion.

His poetic style is what I think Professor C. S. Lewis would call Good Drab. The music is always that of the speaking voice, quiet and sensible, and I cannot think of any other modern poet, except Cavafy, who uses language more simply. He rarely employs metaphors, and there is not a word, not a historical or literary reference in the whole of his work which would be strange to an unbookish boy of fifteen. Yet he man­ages to make this simple kind of speech express a wide variety of emotion and experience.

Be that as may be, she was in their song. Moreover her voice upon their voices crossed Had now persisted in the woods so long That probably it would never be lost. Never again would bird's song be the same. And to do that to birds was why she came.

I hope if he is where he sees me now He's so far off he can't see what I've come to. You can come down from everything to nothing. All is, if I'd a-known when I was young And full of it, that this would be the end. It doesn't seem as if I'd had the courage To make so free and kick up in folk's faces. I might have, but it doesn't seem as if.

The emotions in the first passage are tender, happy, and its reflections of a kind which could only be made by an educated man. The emotions in the second are violent and tragic, and the speaker a woman with no schooling. Yet the diction in both is equally simple. There are a few words the man uses which the woman would not use herself, but none she could not understand; her syntax is a little cruder than his, but only a litde. Yet their two voices sound as distinct as they sound authentic.

Frost's poetic speech is the speech of a mature mind, fully awake and in control of itself; it is not the speech of dream or of uncontrollable passion. Except in reported speech, inter­jections, imperatives and rhetorical interrogatives are rare. This does not mean, of course, that his poems are lacking in feeling; again and again, one is aware of strong, even violent, emotion behind what is actually said, but the saying is reticent, the poetry has, as it were, an auditory chastity. It would be im­possible for Frost, even if he wished, to produce an unabashed roar of despair, as Shakespeare's tragic heroes so often can, but the man who wrote the following lines has certainly been acquainted with despair.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet When far away an interrupted cry Came over houses from another street, But not to call me back or say good-bye. And further still at an unearthly height One luminary clock against the sky Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right. I have been one acquainted with the night.

Every style has its limitations. It would be as impossible to write "Ebauche d'un Serpent" in the style of Frost as it would be to write "The Death of the Hired Man" in the style of Valery. A style, like Frost's which approximates to ordinary speech is necessarily contemporary, the style of a man living in the first half of the twentieth century; it is not well suited, therefore, to subjects from the distant past, in which the difference between then and today is significant, or to mythical subjects which are timeless.

Neither Frost's version of the Job story in A Masque of Reason nor his version of the Jonah story in A Masque of Mercy seems to me quite to come off; both are a little self­consciously in modem dress.

Nor is such a style well-suited to official public occasions when a poet must speak about and on behalf of the Civitas Terrenae. Frost's tone of voice, even in his dramatic pieces, is that of a man talking to himself, thinking aloud and hardly aware of an audience. This manner is, of course, like all manners, calculated, and more sophisticated than most. The calculation is sound when the poems are concerned with personal emotions, but when the subject is one of public affairs or ideas of general interest, it may be a miscalculation. "Build Soil, a Political Pastoral" which Frost composed for the National Party Convention at Columbia University in 1932., was much criticized at the time by the Liberal-Left for being reactionary. Reading it today, one wonders what all their fuss was about, but the fireside-chat I'm-a-plain-fellow manner is still irritating. One finds oneself wishing that Columbia had invited Yeats instead; he might have said the most outrageous things, but he would have put on a good act, and that is what we want from a poet when he speaks to us of what concerns us, not as private persons but as citizens. Perhaps Frost himself felt uneasy, for the last two lines of the poem, and the best, run thus:

We're too unseparate. And going home From company means coming to our senses.

Any poetry which aims at being a clarification of life must be concerned with two questions about which all men, whether they read poetry or not, seek clarification.

O Who can 1? What is the difference between man and all other creatures? What relations are possible between them? What is man's status in the universe? What are the conditions of his existence which he must accept as his fate which no wishing can alter?

2.) Whom ought I to become? What are the character­istics of the hero, the authentic man whom everybody should admire and try to become? Vice versa, what are the characteristics of the churl, the unauthentic man whom everybody should try to avoid becoming?

We all seek answers to these questions which shall be uni­versally valid under all circumstances, but the experiences to which we put them are always local both in time and place. What any poet has to say about man's status in nature, for example, depends in part upon the landscape and climate he happens to live in and in part upon the reactions to it of his personal temperament. A poet brought up in the tropics can­not have the same vision as a poet brought up in Hertfordshire and, if they inhabit the same landscape, the chirpy social endomorph will give a different picture of it from that of the melancholic withdrawn ectomorph.

The nature in Frost's poetry is the nature of New England. New England is made of granite, is mountainous, densely wooded, and its soil is poor. It has a long severe winter, a summer that is milder and more pleasant than in most parts of the States, a short and sudden Spring, a slow and theatri­cally beautiful fall. Since it adjoins the eastern seaboard, it was one of the first areas to be settled but, as soon as the more fertile lands to the West were opened up, it began to lose population. Tourists and city dwellers who can afford a summer home may arrive for the summer, but much land which was once cultivated has gone back to the wild.

One of Frost's favorite images is the image of the abandoned house. In Britain or Europe, a ruin recalls either historical change, political acts like war or enclosure, or, in the case of abandoned mine buildings, a successful past which came to an end, not because nature was too strong, but because she had been robbed of everything she possessed. A ruin in Europe, therefore, tends to arouse reflections about human injustice and greed and the nemesis that overtakes human pride. But in Frost's poetry, a ruin is an image of human heroism, of a defense in the narrow pass against hope­less odds.

I came an errand one cloud-blowing morning To a slab-built, black-paper-covered house Of one room and one window and one door, The only dwelling in a waste cut over A hundred square miles round it in the mountains: And that not dwelt in now by men or women. (It never had been dwelt in, though, by women.)

Here further up the mountain slope Than there was ever any hope, My father built, enclosed a spring, Strung chains of wall round everything, Subdued the growth of earth to grass, And brought our various lives to pass. A dozen girls and boys we were. The mountain seemed to like the stir And made of us a litde while— With always something in her smile. To-day she wouldn't know our name. (No girl's of course has stayed the same.) The mountain pushed us off her knees. And now her lap is full of trees.

Thumbing through Frost's Collected Poems, I find twenty- one in which the season is winter as compared with five in which it is spring, and in two of these there is still snow on the ground; I find twenty-seven in which the time is night and seventeen in which the weather is stormy.

The commonest human situation in his poetry is of one man, or a man and wife, alone in a small isolated house in a snowbound forest after dark.

Where I could think of no thoroughfare, Away on the mountain up far too high, A blinding headlight shifted glare And began to bounce down a granite stair Like a star fresh-fallen out of the sky,

And I away in my opposite wood Am touched by that unintimate light And made feel less alone than I rightly should, For traveler there could do me no good

Were I in trouble with night tonight.

* • * • •

We looked and looked, but after all where are we? Do we know any better where we are, And how it stands between the night tonight And a man with a smokey lantern chimney, How different from the way it ever stood?

In "Two Look at Two," nature, as represented by a buck stag and a doe, responds in sympathy to man, as represented by a boy and girl, but the point of the poem is that this sympa­thetic response is a miraculous exception. The normal response is that described in "The Most of It."

Some morning from the boulder-broken beach He would cry out on life that what it wants Is not its own love back in copy speech, But counter-love, original response. And nothing ever came of what he cried Unless it was the embodiment that crashed In the cliff's talus on the other side, And then in the far distant water splashed, But after a time allowed for it to swim, Instead of proving human when it neared And some one else additional to him, As a great buck it powerfully appeared . . .

Nature, however, is not to Frost, as she was to Melville, malignant.

It must be a litde more in favor of man,

Say a fraction of one per cent at least,

Or our number living wouldn't be steadily more.

She is, rather, the Dura Virum Nutrix who, hy her apparent indifference and hostility, even, calls forth all man's powers and courage and makes a real man of him.

Courage is not to be confused with romantic daring. It includes caution and cunning,

All we who prefer to live Have a little whistle we give, And flash at the least alarm "We dive down under the farm

and even financial prudence,

Better to do down dignified

With boughten friendship at your side

Then none at all. Provide, provide!

There have been European poets who have come to similar conclusions about the isolation of the human condition, and nature's indifference to human values, but, compared with an American, they are at a disadvantage in expressing them. Living as they do in a well, even overpopulated, countryside where, thanks to centuries of cultivation, Mother Earth has acquired human features, they are forced to make abstract philosophical statements or use uncommon atypical images, so that what they say seems to be imposed upon them by theory and temperament rather than by facts. An American poet like Frost, on the other hand, can appeal to facts for which any theory must account and which any temperament must admit.

The Frostian man is isolated not only in space but also in time. In Frost's poems the nostalgic note is seldom, if ever, struck. When he writes a poem about childhood like "Wild Grapes," childhood is not seen as a magical Eden which will all too soon, alas, be lost, but as a school in which the first lessons of adult life are learned. The setting of one of his best long poems, "The Generations of Man," is the ancestral home of the Stark family in the town of Bow, New Hampshire. Bow is a rock-strewn township where farming has fallen off and sproutlands flourish since the axe has gone. The Stark family mansion is by now reduced to an old cellar-hole at the side of a by-road. The occasion described in the poem is a gathering together from all over of the Stark descendants, an advertising stunt thought up by the governor of the state. The characters are a boy Stark and a girl Stark, distant cousins, who meet at the cellar-hole and are immediately attracted to each other. Their conversation turns, naturally, to their com­mon ancestors, but, in fact, they know nothing about them. The boy starts inventing stories and doing imaginary imitations of their voices as a way of courtship, making their ancestors hint at marriage and suggest building a new summer home on the site of the old house. The real past, that is to say, is unknown and unreal to them; its role in the poem is to provide a lucky chance for the living to meet.

Like Gray, Frost has written a poem on a deserted grave­yard. Gray is concerned with the possible lives of the un­known dead; the past is more imaginatively exciting to him than the present. But Frost does not try to remember anything; what moves him is that death, which is always a present terror, is no longer present here, having moved on like a pioneer.

It would be easy to be clever And tell the stones; men hate to die And have stopped dying now for ever. I think they would believe the lie.

What he finds valuable in man's temporal existence is the ever-recurrent opportunity of the present moment to make a discovery or a new start.

One of the lies would make it out that nothing Ever presents itself before us twice. Where would we be at last if that were so? Our very life depends on everything's Recurring till we answer from within. The thousandth time may prove the charm.

Frost has written a number of pastoral eclogues and, no doubt, has taken a sophisticated pleasure in using what is, by tradition, the most aristocratic and idyllic of all literary forms to depict democratic realities. If the landscape of New England is unarcadian, so is its social life; the leisured class with nothing to do but cultivate its sensibility which the European pastoral presupposes, is simply not there. Of course, as in all societies, social distinctions exist. In New England, Protestants of Anglo-Scotch stock consider themselves a cut above Roman Catholics and those of a Latin race, and the most respectable Protestant denominations are the Congregationalists and the Unitarians. Thus, in "The Ax-Helve," the Yankee farmer is aware of his social condescension in entering the house of his French-Canadian neighbor, Baptiste.

I shouldn't mind his being overjoyed (If overjoyed he was) at having got me Where I must judge if what he knew about an ax That not everybody else knew was to count For nothing in the measure of a neighbor. Hard if, though cast away for life with Yankees, A Frenchman couldn't get his human rating!

And in "Snow," Mrs. Cole passes judgment upon the Evan­gelical preacher, Meserve.

I detest the thought of him With his ten children under ten years old. I hate his wretched little Racker Sect, All's ever I heard of it, which isn't much.

Yet in both poems the neighbor triumphs over the snob. The Yankee acknowledges Baptiste's superior skill, and the Coles stay up all night in concern until they hear that Meserve has reached home safely through the storm.

In the Frost pastoral, the place of the traditional worldly- wise, world-weary courtier is taken by the literary city dweller, often a college student who has taken a job for the summer on a farm; the rustics he encounters are neither comic bump­kins nor noble savages.

In "A Hundred Collars," a refined shy college professor meets in a small town hotel bedroom a fat whisky-drinking vulgarian who canvasses the farms around on behalf of a local newspaper. If, in the end, the reader's sympathies go to the vulgarian, the vulgarian is not made aesthetically appeal­ing nor the professor unpleasant. The professor means well —he is a democrat, if not at heart, in principle—but he is the victim of a way of life which has narrowed his human sympathies and interests. The vulgarian is redeemed by his uninhibited friendliness which is perfectly genuine, not a professional salesman's manner. Though vulgar, he is not a go-getter.

'One would suppose they might not be as glad to see you as you are to see them.'

'Oh,

Because I want their dollar? I don't want Anything they've got. I never dun. I'm there, and they can pay me if they like. I go nowhere on purpose: I happen by.'

In "The Code," a town-bred farmer unwittingly offends one of his hired hands.

'What is there wrong?'

'Something you just now said.'

'What did I say?'

'About our taking pains.'

'To cock the hay—because it's going to shower?

I said that more than half an hour ago.

I said it to myself as much as you.'

'You didn't know. But James is one big fool.

He thought you meant to find fault with his work,

That's what the average farmer would have meant.' ...

'He's a fool if that's the way he takes me.'

'Don't let it bother you. You've found out something.

The hand that knows his business won't be told

To do work better or faster—those two things. . .

The ignorance of the town-bred farmer is made use of, not to blame him, but to praise the quality which, after courage,

Frost ranks as the highest of the virtues, the self-respect which comes from taking a pride in something. It may be a pride in ones own skill, the pride of the axe-maker Baptiste, the pride of the Hired Man who dies from a broken heart since old age has taken from him the one accomplishment, build­ing a load of hay, which had hitherto prevented him from feeling utterly worthless, or it may be a pride which, from a worldly point of view, is a folly, the pride of the man who has failed as a farmer, burned his house down for the insur­ance money, bought a telescope with the proceeds and. taken a lowly job as a ticket agent on the railroad. The telescope is not a good one, the man is poor, but he is proud of his tele­scope and happy.

Every poet is at once a representative of his culture and its critic. Frost has never written satires, but it is not hard to guess what, as an American, he approves and disapproves of in his own countrymen. The average American is a stoic and, contrary to what others are apt to conclude from his free-and- easy friendly manner, reticent, far more reticent than the average Englishman about showing his feelings. He believes in independence because he has to; life is too mobile and circumstances change too fast for him to be supported by any fixed frame of family or social relations. In a crisis he will help his neighbor, whoever he may be, but he will regard someone who is always coming for help as a bad neighbor, and he disapproves of all self-pity and nostalgic regret. All these qualities find their expression in Frost's poetry, but there are other American characteristics which are not to be found there, the absence of which implies disapproval; the belief, for instance, that it should be possible, once the right gimmick has been found, to build the New Jerusalem on earth in half an hour. One might describe Frost as a Tory, provided that one remembers that all American political parties are Whigs.

Hardy, Yeats and Frost have all written epitaphs for them­selves.

I never cared for life, life cared for me.

And hence I owe it some fidelity. . . .

Yeats Cast a cold eye On life and death. Horseman, pass hy.

Frost

I would have written of me on my stone

I had a lover's quarrel with the world.

Of the three, Frost, surely, comes off best. Hardy seems to be stating the Pessimist's Case rather than his real feelings. I never cared . . . Never? Now, Mr. Hardy, really! Yeats' horseman is a stage prop; the passer-by is much more likely to be a motorist. But Frost convinces me that he is telling neither more nor less than the truth about himself. And, when it comes to wisdom, is not having a lover's quarrel with life more worthy of Prospero than not caring or looking coldly?

AMERICAN POETRY

The land was ours before we were the land's. She was our land more than a hundred years Before we were her people. She was ours In Massachusetts, in Virginia, But we were England's, still colonials, Possessing what we still were unpossessed hy, Possessed hy what we now no more possessed. Something we were withholding made us weak Until we found out that it was ourselves We were withholding from our land of living, And forthwith found salvation in surrender. Such as we were we gave ourselves outright (The deed of gift was many deeds of war*) To the land vaguely realizing westward, But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced, Such as she was, such as she would become.

ROBERT FROST

One often hears it said that only in this century have the writers of the United States learned to stand on their own feet and be truly American, that, previously, they were slavish imitators of British literature. Applied to the general reading public and academic circles, this has a certain amount of truth but, so far as the writers themselves are concerned, it is quite false. From Bryant on there is scarcely one American poet whose work, if unsigned, could be mistaken for that of an Englishman. What English poet, for example, in need of emotive place names for a serious poem, would have employed, neither local names nor names famous in history or mythology, but names made up by himself as Poe did in "Ulalume"? Would an English poet have received the idea of writing a scientific cosmological prose poem and of prefacing it thus: "I offer this Book of Truths, not in its character of Truth- teller, but for the Beauty that abounds in its Truth, con­stituting it true. . . . What I here pro-pound is true: therefore it cannot die. . . . Nevertheless it is as a Poem only that I wish this work to be judged after I am dead." (Poe, Preface to "Eureka")?

Maud, The Song of Hiawatha and the first edition of Leaves of Grass all appeared in the same year, 1855: no two poets could be more unlike each other than Longfellow and Whit­man—such diversity is in itself an American phenomenon— yet, when compared with Tennyson, each in his own way shows characteristics of the New World. Tennyson and Long­fellow were both highly skillful technicians in conventional forms and both were regarded by their countrymen as the respectable mouthpieces of their age, and yet, how different they are. There is much in Tennyson that Longfellow would never have dared to write, for the peculiar American mixture of Puritan conscience and democratic license can foster in some cases a genteel horror of the coarse for which no Eng­lishman has felt the need. On the other hand Longfellow had a curiosity about the whole of European literature compared with which Tennyson, concerned only with the poetry of his own land and the classical authors on whom he was educated, seems provincial. Even if there had been Red Indians roaming the North of Scodand, unsubjugated and unassimilable, one cannot imagine Tennyson sitting down to write a long poem about them and choosing for it a Finnish meter. Leaving aside all questions of style, there is a difference between Tennyson's

Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington and Whitman's elegy for President Lincoln When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd which is significant. Tennyson, as one would expect from the tide of his poem, mourns for a great public official figure, but it would be very hard to guess from the words of Whitman's poem that the man he is talking of was the head of a State; one would naturally think that he was some close personal friend, a private individual.

To take one more example—two poets, contemporaries, both women, both religious, both introverts preoccupied with renunciation—Christina Rossetti and Emily Dickinson; could anyone imagine either of them in the country of the other¹? When I try to fancy such translations, the only Americans I can possibly imagine as British are minor poets with a turn for light verse like Lowell and Holmes; and the only British poets who could conceivably have been American are eccen­trics like Blake and Hopkins.

Normally, in comparing the poetry of two cultures, the obvious and easiest point at which to start is with a comparison of the peculiar characteristics, grammatical, rhetorical, rhyth­mical, of their respective languages, for even the most formal and elevated styles of poetry are more conditioned by the spoken tongue, the language really used by the men of that country, than by anything else. In the case of British and American poetry, however, this is the most subtle difference of all and die hardest to define. Any Englishman, with a litde effort, can learn to pronounce "the letter a in psalm and calm. . . . with the sound of a in candle," to say thumb-tacks instead of drawing-pins or twenty-minutes-of-one instead of twenty- minutes-to-one, and discover that, in the Middle West, bought rhymes with hot, but he will still be as far from speaking American English as his Yankee cousin who comes to England will be from speaking the Queen's. No dramatist in either country who has introduced a character from the other side, has, to my knowledge, been able to make his speech convinc­ing. What the secret of the difference is, I cannot put my finger on; William Carlos Williams, who has thought more than most about this problem, says that "Pace is one of its most important

manifestations" and to this one might add another, Pitch. If undefinable, the difference is, however, immediately recog­nizable by the ear, even in verse where the formal conventions are the same.

He must have had a father and a mother— In fact I've heard him say so—and a dog, As a boy should, I venture; and the dog, Most likely, was the only man who knew him. A dog, for all I know, is what he needs As much as anything right here today, To counsel him about his disillusions, Old aches, and parturitions of what's coming— A dog of orders, an emeritus, To wag his tail at him when he comes home, And then to put his paws up on his knees And say, Tor God's sake, what's it all about?' (e. a. robinson, "Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford.")

Whatever this may owe to Browning, the fingering is quite different and un-British. Again, how American in rhythm as well as in sensibility is this stanza by Robert Frost:

But no, I was out for stars: I would not come in. I meant not even if asked, And I hadn't been.

("Come In.")

Until quite recendy an English writer, like one of any European country, could presuppose two conditions, a nature which was mythologized, humanized, on the whole friendly, and a human society which had become in time, whatever succession of invasions it may have suffered in the past, in race and religion more or less homogeneous and in which most people lived and died in the locality where they were born.

Christianity might have deprived Aphrodite, Apollo, the local genius, of their divinity but as figures for the forces of nature, as a mode of thinking about the creation, they re­mained valid for poets and their readers alike. Descartes might reduce the nonhuman universe to a mechanism but the feel­ings of Europeans about the sun and moon, the cycle of the seasons, the local landscape remained unchanged. Words­worth might discard the mythological terminology but the kind of relation between nature and man which he described was the same personal one. Even when nineteenth-century biology began to trouble men's minds with the thought that the universe might be without moral values, their immediate experience was still of a friendly and lovable nature. Whatever their doubts and convictions about the purpose and significance of the universe as a whole, Tennyson's Lincolnshire or Hardy's Dorset were places where they felt completely at home, land­scapes with faces of their own which a human being could recognize and trust.

But in America, neither the size nor the condition nor the climate of the continent encourages such intimacy. It is an unforgettable experience for anyone born on the other side of the Atlantic to take a plane journey by night across the United States. Looking down he will see the lights of some town like a last outpost in a darkness stretching for hours ahead, and realize that, even if there is no longer an actual frontier, this is still a continent only partially setded and developed, where human activity seems a tiny thing in com­parison to the magnitude of the earth, and the equality of men not some dogma of politics or jurisprudence but a self- evident fact. He will behold a wild nature, compared with which the landscapes of Salvator Rosa are as cosy as Arcadia and which cannot possibly be thought of in human or personal terms. If Henry Adams could write:

When Adams was a boy in Boston, the best chemist in the place had probably never heard of Venus except by way of scandal, or of the Virgin except as idolatry. . . . The force of the Virgin was still felt at Lourdes, and seemed to be as potent as X-rays; but in America neither Venus nor Virgin ever had value as force—at most as sentiment. No American had ever been truly afraid of either

the reason for this was not simply that the Mayflower carried iconophobic dissenters but also that the nature which Amer­icans, even in New England, had every reason to fear could not possibly be imagined as a mother. A white whale whom man can neither understand nor be understood by, whom only a madman like Gabriel can worship, the only relation­ship with whom is a combat to the death by which a man's courage and skill are tested and judged, or the great buck who answers the poet's prayer for "someone else additional to him" in "The Most of It" are more apt symbols. Thoreau, who certainly tried his best to become intimate with nature, had to confess

I walk in nature still alone

And know no one, Discern no lineament nor feature

Of any creature. Though all the firmament

Is o'er me bent, Yet still I miss the grace Of an intelligent and kindred face. I still must seek the friend Who does with nature blend, Who is the person in her mask, He is the man I ask. . . .

Many poets in the Old World have become disgusted with human civilization but what the earth would be like if the race became extinct they cannot imagine; an American like Robinson Jeffers can quite easily, for he has seen with his own eyes country as yet untouched by history.

In a land which is fully setded, most men must accept their local environment or try to change it by political means; only the exceptionally gifted or adventurous can leave to seek his fortune elsewhere. In America, on the other hand, to move on and make a fresh start somewhere else is still the normal reac­tion to dissatisfaction or failure. Such social fluidity has impor­tant psychological effects. Since movement involves breaking social and personal ties, the habit creates an attitude towards personal relationships in which impermanence is taken for granted.

One could find no better illustration of the difference be­tween the Old and the New World than the respective con­clusions of Oliver Twist and Huckleberry Finn, both the heroes of which are orphans. When Oliver is at last adopted by Mr. Brownlow, his fondest dream, to have a home, to be surrounded by familiar friendly faces, to receive an education, is realized. Huck is offered adoption too, significantly by a woman not a man, but refuses because he knows she would try to "civilize" him, and announces his intention to light out by himself for the West; Jim, who has been his "buddy"" in a friendship far closer than any enjoyed by Oliver, is left behind like an old shoe, just as in Moby Dick Ishmael be­comes a blood-brother of Queequeg and then forgets all about him. Naturally the daydream of the lifelong comrade in ad­venture often appears in American literature:

Camerado, I give you my hand!

I give you my love more precious than money,

I give you myself before preaching or law;

Will you give me yourself? will you come travel with me?

Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?

(whitman, "Song of the Open Road.")

but no American seriously expects such a dream to come true.

To be able at any time to break with the past, to move and keep on moving lessens the significance not only of the past but also of the future which is reduced to the immediate future, and minimizes the importance of political action. A European may be a conservative who thinks that the right form of society has been discovered already, or a liberal who* believes it is in process of being realized, or a revolutionary who thinks that after long dark ages it can now be realized for the first time, but each of them knows that, by reason or force, he must convince the others that he is right; he may be an optimist about the future or a pessimist. None of these terms applies accurately to an American, for his profoundest feeling towards the future is not that it will be better or worse but that it is unpredictable, that all things, good and bad, will change. No failure is irredeemable, no success a final satisfaction. Democracy is the best form of government, not because men will necessarily lead better or happier lives under it, but because it permits constant experiment; a given experiment may fail but the people have a right to make their own mistakes. America has always been a country of amateurs where the professional, that is to say, the man who claims authority as a member of an elite which knows the law in some field or other, is an object of distrust and resentment.

Amerika, du hast es hesser Als unser Kontinent, der alte, Hast heine verfallenen Schloesser Und heine Basalte

wrote Goethe, by heine Basalte meaning, I presume, no violent political revolutions. This is a subject about which, in relation to their own histories, the English and the Americans cherish opposite fictions. Between 1533 and 1688 the English went through a succession of revolutions in which a Church was imposed on them by the engines of the State, one king was executed and another deposed, yet they prefer to forget it and pretend that the social structure of England is the product of organic peaceful growth. The Americans, on the other hand, like to pretend that what was only a successful war of secession was a genuine revolution.

If we apply the term revolution to what happened in North America between 1776 and 1829, it has a special meaning.

Normally, the word describes the process by which man transforms himself from one kind of man, living in one kind of society, with one way of looking at the world, into another kind of man, another society, another conception of life. So it is with the Papal, the Lutheran, the English, and the French revolutions. The American case is different; it is not a ques­tion of the Old Man transforming himself into the New, but of the New Man becoming alive to the fact that he is new, that he has been transformed already without his having realized it.

The War of Independence was the first step, the leaving of the paternal roof in order to find out who one is; the second and more important step, the actual discovery, came with Jackson. It was then that it first became clear that, despite similarities of form, representative government in America was not to be an imitation of the English parliamentary system, and that, though the vocabulary of the Constitution may be that of the French Enlightenment, its American meaning is quite distinct. There is indeed an American men­tality which is new and unique in the world but it is the product less of conscious political action than of nature, of the new and unique environment of the American continent. Even the most revolutionary feature of the Constitution, the separation of Church and State, was a recognition of a condi­tion which had existed since the first setdements were made by various religious denominations whose control of the secular authority could only be local. From the beginning America had been a pluralist state and pluralism is incom­patible with an Established Church. The Basalte in American history, the Civil War, might indeed be called Counterrevolu­tion, for it was fought primarily on the issue not of slavery but of unity, that is, not for a freedom but for a limitation on freedom, to ensure that the United States should remain pluralist and not disintegrate into an anarchic heap of frag­ments. Pluralist and experimental: in place of verfallenen Schloesser, America has ghost towns and the relics of New Jerusalems which failed.

The American had not intended to become what he was; he had been made so by emigration and the nature of the American continent. An emigrant never knows what he wants, only what he does not want. A man who comes from a land settled for centuries to a virgin wilderness where he faces problems with which none of his traditions and habits was intended to deal cannot foresee the future but must improvise himself from day to day. It is not surprising, therefore, that the first clear realization of the novelty and importance of the United States should have come not from an American but from outsiders, like Crevecceur and de Tocqueville.

In a society whose dominant task is still that of the pioneer —the physical struggle with nature, and a nature, moreover, particularly recalcitrant and violent—the intellectual is not a figure of much importance. Those with intellectual and artistic tastes, finding themselves a despised or at best an ignored minority, are apt in return to despise the society in which they live as vulgar and think nostalgically of more leisured and refined cultures. The situation of the first impor­tant American poets—Emerson, Thoreau, Poe—was therefore doubly difficult. As writers, and therefore intellectuals, they were without status with the majority; and, on the other hand, the cultured minority of which they were members looked to England for its literary standards and did not want to think or read about America.

This dependence on English literature was a hindrance to their development in a way which it would not have been had they lived elsewhere. A poet living in England, for instance, might read nothing but French poetry, or he might move to Italy and know only English, without raising any serious barrier between himself and his experiences. Indeed, in Europe, whenever some journalist raises the patriotic demand for an English or French or Dutch literature free from foreign influences, we know him at once to be a base fellow. The wish for an American literature, on the other hand, has nothing to do really, with politics or national conceit; it is a demand for honesty. All European literature so far has presupposed two things: a nature which is humanized, mythologized, usu­ally friendly, and a human society in which most men stay where they were born and do not move about much. Neither of these presuppositions was valid for America, where nature was virgin, devoid of history, usually hostile; and society was fluid, its groupings always changing as men moved on some­where else.

The European romantics may praise the charms of wild desert landscape, but they know that for them it is never more than a few hours' walk from a comfortable inn: they may celebrate the joys of solitude but they know that any time they choose they can go back to the family roof or to town and that there their cousins and nephews and nieces and aunts, the club and the salons, will still be going on exactly as they left them. Of real desert, of a loneliness which knows of no enduring relationships to cherish or reject, they have no conception.

The achievement of Emerson and Thoreau was twofold: they wrote of the American kind of nature, and they perceived what qualities were most needed by members of the American kind of society, which was threatened, not by the petrified injustice of any tradition, but by the fluid irresponsibility of crowd opinion. Their work has both the virtues and the vices of the isolated and the protestant: on the one hand it is always genuine and original, it is never superficial; on the other it is a little too cranky, too earnest, too scornful of ele­gance. Just as in their political thinking Americans are apt to identify the undemocratic with monarchy, so, in their aesthetics, they are apt to identify the falsely conventional with rhyme and meter. The prose of Emerson and Thoreau is superior to their verse, because verse in its formal nature pro­tests against protesting; it demands that to some degree we ac­cept things as they are, not for any rational or moral reason, but simply because they happen to be that way; it implies an element of frivority in the creation.

Whatever one may feel about Whitman's poetry, one is bound to admit that he was the first clearly to recognize what the conditions were with which any future American poet would have to come to terms.

Plenty of songs had been sung—beautiful, matchless

songs—adjusted to other lands than these. . . . the

Old World has had the poems of myths, fictions, feudal­ism, conquest, caste, dynastic wars, and splendid excep­tional characters, which have been great; but the New World needs the poems of realities and science and of the democratic average and basic equality. ... As for native American individuality, the distinctive and ideal type of Western character (as consistent with the opera­tive and even money-making features of United States humanity as chosen knights, gentlemen and warriors were the ideals of the centuries of European feudalism) it has not yet appeared. I have allowed the stress of my poems from beginning to end to bear upon American in­dividuality and assist it—not only because that is a great lesson in Nature, amid all her generalizing laws, but as counterpoise to the levelling tendencies of Democracy.

The last sentence makes it quite clear that by the "average" hero who was to replace the "knight," Whitman did not mean the mediocre, but the individual whose "exceptional character" is not derived from birth, education or occupation, and that he is aware of how difficult it is for such an individual to appear without the encouragement which comes from membership in some elite.

What he does not say, and perhaps did not realize, is that, in a democracy, the status of the poet himself is changed. However fantastic, in the light of present-day realities, his notion may be, every European poet, I believe, still instinc­tively thinks of himself as a "clerk," a member of a professional brotherhood, with a certain social status irrespective of the number of his readers (in his heart of hearts the audience he desires and expects are those who govern the country), and as taking his place in an unbroken historical succession. In the States, poets have never had or imagined they had such a status, and it is up to each individual poet to justify his existence by offering a unique product. It would be grossly unjust to assert that there are fewer lovers of poetry in the New World than in the Old—in how many places in the latter could a poet demand and receive a substantial sum for reading his work aloud?—but there is a tendency, perhaps, in the former, for audiences to be drawn rather by a name than a poem, and for a poet, on his side, to demand approval for his work not simply because it is good but because it is his. To some degree every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one. "Tradition," wrote Mr. T. S. Eliot in a famous essay, "cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour." I do not think that any European critic would have said just this. He would not, of course, deny that every poet must work hard but the suggestion in the first half of the sentence that no sense of tradition is acquired except by conscious effort would seem strange to him.

There are advantages and disadvantages in both attitudes. A British poet can take writing more for granted and so write with a lack of strain and overearnestness. American poetry has many tones, but the tone of a man talking to a group of his peers is rare; for a "serious" poet to write light verse is frowned on in America and if, when he is asked why he writes poetry, he replies, as any European poet would, "For fun," his audience will be shocked. On the other hand, a British poet is in much greater danger of becoming lazy, or academic, or irresponsible. One comes across passages, even in very fine English poets, which make one think: "Yes, very effective but does he believe what he is saying?": in American poetry such passages are extremely rare. The first thing that strikes a reader about the best American poets is how utterly unlike each other they are. Where else in the world, for example, could one find seven poets of approximately the same generation so different as Ezra Pound, W. C. Williams, Vachel Lindsay, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings and Laura Riding? The danger for the American poet is not of writing like everybody else but of crankiness and a parody of his own manner.

Plato, following Damon of Athens, said that when the modes of music change, the walls of the city are shaken. It might be truer to say, perhaps, that a change in the modes gives warning of a shaking of the walls in die near future.

The social strains which later break out in political action are first experienced by artists as a feeling that the current modes of expression are no longer capable of dealing with their real concerns. Thus, when one thinks of "modern" painting, music, fiction or poetry, the names which immediately come to mind as its leaders and creators are those of persons who were born roughly between 1870 and 1890 and who began pro­ducing their "new" work before the outbreak of World War I in 1914, and in poetry and fiction, at least, American names are prominent.

When a revolutionary break with the past is necessary it is an advantage not to be too closely identified with any one particular literature or any particular cultural group. Amer­icans like Eliot and Pound, for example, could be as curious about French or Italian poetry as about English and could hear poetry of the past, like the verse of Webster, freshly in a way that for an Englishman, trammeled by traditional notions of Elizabethan blank verse, would have been difficult.

Further, as Americans, they were already familiar with the dehumanized nature and the social leveling which a techno­logical civilization was about to make universal and with which the European mentality was unprepared to deal. After his visit to America, de Tocqueville made a remarkable prophecy about the kind of poetry which a democratic society would produce.

I am persuaded that in the end democracy diverts the imagination from all that is external to man and fixes it on man alone. Democratic nations may amuse themselves for a while with considering the productions of nature, but they are excited in reality only by a survey of them­selves. . . .

The poets who lived in aristocratic ages have been eminently successful in their delineation of certain inci­dents in the life of a people or a man; but none of them ever ventured to include within his performances the destinies of mankind, a task which poets writing in democratic ages may attempt. . . .

It may be foreseen in like manner that poets living in democratic times will prefer the delineation of pas­sions and ideas to that of persons and achievements. The language, the dress, and the daily actions of men in democracies are repugnant to conceptions of the ideal. . . . This forces the poet constandy to search below the external surface which is palpable to the senses, in order to read the inner soul; and nothing lends itself more to the delineation of the ideal than the scrutiny of the hidden depths in the immaterial nature of man. . . . The destinies of mankind, man himself taken aloof from his country and his age, and standing in the presence of Nature and of God, with his passions, his doubts, his rare prosperities and inconceivable wretchedness, will become the chief, if not the sole, theme of poetry.

If this be an accurate description of the poetry we call modern, then one might say that America has never known any other kind.

PART SEVEN

The Shield of Perseus

NOTES ON THE COMIC

If a man wants to set up as an innkeeper and he does not succeed, it is not comic. If, on the contrary, a girl asks to he allowed to set up as a prostitute and she fails, which sometimes hap­pens, it is comic.

s0ren kierkegaard

A man's character may he inferred from nothing so surely as from the jest he takes in had part.

g. c. lichtenberg

General Definition

A contradiction in the relation of the individual or the per­sonal to the universal or the impersonal which does not involve the spectator or hearer in suffering or pity, which in practice means that it must not involve the actor in real suffering.

A situation in which the actor really suffers can only be found comic by children who see only the situation and are unaware of the suffering, as when a child laughs at a hunchback, or by human swine.

A few years ago, there was a rage in New York for telling "Horror Jokes." For example :

A mother (to her blind daughter): Now, dear, shut your eyes and count twenty. Then open them, and you'll find that you can see. Daughter (after counting twenty): But, Mummy, I still

can't see. Mother: April fool!

This has the same relation to the comic as blasphemy has to belief in God, that is to say, it implies a knowledge of what is truly comic.

We sometimes make a witty remark about someone which is also cruel, but we make it behind his back, not to his face, and we hope that nobody will repeat it to him.

When we really hate someone, we cannot find him comic; there are no genuinely funny stories about Hitler.

A sense of humor develops in a society to the degree that its members are simultaneously conscious of being each a unique person and of being all in common subjection to unalterable laws.

Primitive cultures have little sense of humor; firstly, because their sense of human individuality is weak—the tribe is the real unit—and, secondly, because, as animists or polytheists, they have little notion of necessity. To them, events do not occur because they must, but because some god or spirit chooses to make them happen. They recognize a contradiction between the individual and the universal only when it is a tragic contradiction involving exceptional suffering.

In our own society, addicted gamblers who make a religion out of chance are invariably humorless.

Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.

Some Types of Comic Contradiction

i) The operation of physical laws upon inorganic objects associated with a human being in such a way that it is they who appear to be acting from personal volition and their owner who appears to be the passive thing.

Example: A man is walking in a storm protected by an um­brella when a sudden gust of wind blows it inside out. This is comic for two reasons:

An umbrella is a mechanism designed by man to function in a particular manner, and its existence and effectiveness as a protection depend upon man's under­standing of physical laws. An umbrella turning inside out is funnier than a hat blowing off because an umbrella is made to be opened, to change its shape when its owner wills. It now continues to change its shape, in obedience to the same laws, but against his will.

The activating agent, the wind, is invisible, so the cause of the umbrella turning inside out appears to lie in the umbrella itself. It is not particularly funny if a tile falls and makes a hole in the umbrella, because the cause is visibly natural.

When a film is run backwards, reversing the historical succes­sion of events, the flow of volition is likewise reversed and proceeds from the object to the subject. What was originally the action of a man taking off his coat becomes the action of a coat putting itself on a man.

The same contradiction is the basis of most of the comic effects of the clown. In appearance he is the clumsy man whom inanimate objects conspire against to torment; this in itself is funny to watch, but our profounder amusement is derived from our knowledge that this is only an appearance, that, in reality, the accuracy with which the objects trip him up or hit him on the head is caused by the clown's own skill.

2,) A clash between the laws of the inorganic which has no telos, and the behavior of living creatures who have one.

Example: A man walking down the street, with his mind concentrated upon the purpose of his journey, fails to notice a banana skin, slips and falls down. Under the obsession of his goal—it may be a goal of thought—he forgets his subjection to the law of gravity. His goal need not necessarily be a unique and personal one; he may simply be looking for a public lavatory. All that matters is that he should be ignoring the present for the sake of the future. A child learning to walk, or an adult picking his way carefully over an icy surface, are not funny if they fall down, because they are conscious of the present.

Comic Situations in the Relationship Between the Sexes

As a natural creature a human being is born either male or female and endowed with an impersonal tendency to repro­duce the human species by mating with any member of the opposite sex who is neither immature nor senile. In this tendency the individuality of any given male or female is subordinate to its general reproductive function. (MaZe and female created He them .. . Be fruitful and multiply

As a historical person, every man and woman is a unique in­dividual, capable of entering into a unique relation of love with another person. As a person, the relationship takes precedence over any function it may also have. (It is not good for man to he alone.)

The ideal of marriage is a relationship in which both these elements are synthesized; husband and wife are simultane­ously involved in relations of physical love and the love of personal friendship.

The synthesis might be easier to achieve if the two elements remained distinct, if the physical, that is, remained as imper­sonal as it is among the animals, and the personal relation was completely unerotic.

In fact, however, we never experience sexual desire as a blind need which is indifferent to its sexual object; our per­sonal history and our culture introduce a selective element so that, even on the most physical level, some types are more desirable than others. Our sexual desire, as such, is impersonal in that it lacks all consideration for the person who is our type, but personal in that our type is our personal taste, not a blind need.

This contradiction is fertile ground for self-deception. It allows us to persuade ourselves that we value the person of another, when, in fact, we only value her (or him) as a sexual object, and it allows us to endow her with an imaginary per­sonality which has little or no relation to the real one.

From the personal point of view, on the other hand, sexual desire, because of its impersonal and unchanging character, is a comic contradiction. The relation between every pair of lovers is unique, but in bed they can only do what all mammals do.

Comic Travesties

Twelfth Night. The pattern of relationships is as follows:

O Viola (Caesario) is wholly in the truth. She knows who she is, she knows that the Duke is a man for whom she feels personal love, and her passionate image of him corresponds to the reality.

2,) The Duke is in the truth in one thing; he knows that he feels a personal affection for Caesario (Viola). This is made easier for him by his boylike appearance—did he look like a nature man, he would fall into a class, the class of potential rivals in love. The fact that he feels personal affection for the illusory Caesario guarantees the authenticity of his love for the real Viola as a person, since it cannot be an illusion provoked by sexual desire.

His relation to Olivia, on the other hand, is erotic- fantastic in one of two ways, and probably in both: either his image of her does not correspond to her real nature or, if it does correspond, it is fantastic in relation to him­self; the kind of wife he really desires is not what he imagines. The fact that, though she makes it clear that she does not return his passion, he still continues to pursue her and by devious strategies, demonstrates that he lacks respect for her as a person.

Olivia lias an erotic-fantastic image of Caesario (Viola). Since she is able to transfer her image success­fully to Caesario's double, Sebastian, and marry him, we must assume that the image of the kind of husband she desires is real in relation to herself and only accidentally fantastic because Caesario happens to be, not a man, but a woman in disguise.

The illusion of Antonio and Sebastian is not con­cerned with the erotic relationship, but with the problem of body-soul identity. It is a general law that a human face is the creation of its owner's past and that, since two persons cannot have the same past, no two faces are alike. Identical twins are the exception to this rule. Viola and Sebastian are twins, but not identical twins, for one is female and the other male; dress them both, however, in male or female clothing, and they appear to be identical twins.

It is impossible to produce Twelfth Night today in an ordinary theatre since feminine roles are no longer played, as they were in Shakespeare's time, by boys. It is essential to the play that, when Viola appears dressed as a boy, the illu­sion should be perfect; if it is obvious to the audience that Caesario is really a girl, the play becomes a farce, and a farce in bad taste, for any serious emotion is impossible in a farce, and some of the characters in T-welfth Night have serious emotions. A boy whose voice has not yet broken can, when dressed as a girl, produce a perfect illusion of a girl; a young woman, dressed as a boy, can never produce a convincing illusion of a boy.

Der Rosenkavalier and Charley's Aunt. To Baron Lerch- enau, the seduction of young chambermaids has become a habit, i.e., what was once a combination of desire and per­sonal choice has become almost an automatic reflex. A costume suggests to him the magic word chambermaid, and the word issues the command Seduce her. The baron, however, is not quite a farce character; he knows the difference between a pretty girl and an ugly one. The mezzo-soprano who plays Octavian should be good-looking enough to give the illusion of a good-looking young man, when dressed as one. In the third act, when she is dressed as what she really is, a girl, she will be pretty, but her acting the role of a chambermaid must be farcical, and give the impression of a bad actor impersonating a girl, so that only a man as obsessed by habit as the Baron could fail to notice it.

Charley's Aunt is pure farce. The fortune-hunting uncle is not a slave of habit; he really desires to marry a rich widow, but her riches are all he desires; he is totally uninterested in sex or in individuals. He has been told that he is going to meet a rich widow, he sees widow's weeds and this is sufficient to set him in motion. To the audience, therefore, it must be obvious that she is neither female nor elderly, but a young undergraduate pretending, with little success, to be both.

The Lover and the Citizen

Marriage is not only a relation between two individuals; it is also a social institution, involving social emotions con­cerned with class status and prestige among one's fellows. This is not in itself comic; it only becomes comic if social emotion is the only motive for a marriage, so that the essential motives for marriage, sexual intercourse, procreation and personal affection, are lacking. A familiar comic situation is that of Don Pas quale. A rich old man plans to marry a young girl against her will, for she is in love with a young man of her own age; the old man at first looks like succeeding, but in the end he is foiled. For this to be comic, the audience must be convinced that Don Pasquale does not really feel either desire or affection for Norina, that his sole motive is a social one, to be able to boast to other old men that he can win a young wife when they cannot. He wants the prestige of parading her and making others envy him. If he really feels either desire or affection, then he will really suffer when his de­signs are foiled, and the situation will be either pathetic or satiric. In Pickwick Papers, the same situation occurs, only this time it is the female sex which has the social motive. Widow after widow pursues Weller, the widower, not because she wants to be married to him in particular, but because she wants the social status of being a married woman.

The haw of the City and the haw of Justice

Example: FalstafFs speech on Honour (Henry IV, Part I,

Act V, Scene II.)

If the warrior ethic of honor, courage and personal loyalty were believed by an Elizabethan or a modern audience to be the perfect embodiment of justice, the speech would not be sympathetically comic, but a satirical device by which Falstaff was held up to ridicule as a coward. If, on the other hand, the warrior ethic were totally unjust, if there were no occasions on which it was a true expression of moral duty, the speech would be, not comic, but a serious piece of pacifist propaganda. The speech has a sympathetically comic effect for two reasons, the circumstances under which it is uttered, and the character of the speaker.

Were the situation one in which the future of the whole community is at stake, as on the field of Agincourt, the speech would strike an unsympathetic note, but the situation is one of civil war, a struggle for power among the feudal nobility in which the claims of both sides to be the legitimate rulers are fairly equal—Henry IV was once a rebel who deposed his King—and a struggle in which their feudal dependents are compelled to take part and risk their lives without having a real stake in the outcome. Irrespective of the speaker, the speech is a comic criticism of the feudal ethic as typified by Hotspur. Courage is a personal virtue, but military glory for military glory's sake can be a social evil; unreasonable and unjust wars create the paradox that the personal vice of cowardice can become a public virtue.

That it should be Falstaff who utters the speech increases its comic effect. Falstaff has a fantastic conception of himself as a daredevil who plays highwayman, which, if it were true, would require exceptional physical courage. He tries to keep up this illusion, but is always breaking down because of his moral courage which keeps forcing him to admit that he is afraid. Further, though he lacks courage, he exemplifies the other side of the warrior ethic, personal loyalty, as contrasted with Prince Hal's Machiavellian manipulation of others. When Falstaff is rejected by the man to whom he has pledged his whole devotion, his death may truly be called a death for the sake of his wounded honor.

The Banal

The human person is a unique singular, analogous to all other persons, but identical with none. Banality is an illusion of identity for, when people describe their experiences in cliches, it is impossible to distinguish the experience of one from the experience of another.

The cliche user is comic because the illusion of being identical with others is created by his own choice. He is the megalomaniac in reverse. Both have fantastic conceptions of themselves but, whereas the megalomaniac thinks of himself as being somebody else—God, Napoleon, Shakespeare—the banal man thinks of himself as being everybody else, that is to say, nobody in particular.

verbal humor

Verbal humor involves a violation in a particular instance of one of the following general principles of language.

O Language is a means of denoting things or thoughts by sounds. It is a law of language that any given verbal sound always means the same thing and only that thing.

Words are man-made things which men use, not per­sons with a will and consciousness of their own. Whether they make sense or nonsense depends upon whether the speaker uses them correctly or incorrecdy.

Any two or more objects or events which language seeks to describe are members, either of separate classes, or of the same class, or of overlapping classes. If they belong to separate classes, they must be described in different terms, and if they belong to the same class they must be described in the same terms. If, however, their classes overlap, either class can be described metaphori­cally in terms which describe the other exacdy, e.g., it is equally possible to say—the plough swims through the soil—and—the ship ploughs through the waves.

4) In origin all language is concrete or metaphorical. In order to use language to express abstractions, we have to ignore its original concrete and metaphorical meanings.

The first law is violated by the pun, the exceptional case in which one verbal sound has two meanings.

When I am dead I hope it may be said: His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.

For the pun to be comic, the two meanings must both make sense in the context. If all books were bound in black, the couplet would not be funny.

Words which rhyme, that is to say, words which denote differ­ent things but are partially similar in sound, are not necessar­ily comic. To be comic, the two things they denote must either be so incongruous with each other that one cannot imagine a real situation in which a speaker would need to bring them together, or so irrelevant to each other, that they could only become associated by pure chance. The effect of a comic rhyme is as if the words, on the basis of their auditory friendship, had taken charge of the situation, as if, instead of an event requiring words to describe it, words had the power to create an event. Reading the lines

There was an Old Man of Whitehaven Who danced a quadrille with a raven

one cannot help noticing upon reflection that, had the old gentleman lived in Ceylon, he would have had to dance with a swan; alternatively, had his dancing partner been a mouse, he might have had to reside in Christ Church, Oxford.

The comic rhyme involves both the first two laws of language; the spoonerism only the second. Example: a lec­turing geologist introduces a lantern slide with the words: "And here, gendemen, we see a fine example of erotic blacks."

So far as the speaker is concerned he has used the language incorrectly, yet what he says makes verbal sense of a kind. Unlike the pun however, where both meanings are relevant, in the spoonerism the accidental meaning is nonsense in the context. Thus, while the comic nature of the pun should be immediately apparent to the hearer, it should take time before he realizes what the speaker of the spoonerism in­tended to say. A pun is witty and intended; a spoonerism, like a comic rhyme, is comic and should appear to be in­voluntary. As with the clown, the speaker appears to be the slave of language, but in reality is its master.

Just as there are people who are really clumsy so there are incompetent poets who are the slaves of the only rhymes they know; the kind of poet caricatured by Shakespeare in the play of Pyramus and Thishe:

Those lily lips, This cherry nose, These yellow cowslip cheeks, Are gone, are gone, Lovers make moan; His eyes were green as leeks. O Sisters Three, Come, come to me With hands as pale as milk; Lay them in gore, Since you have shore With shears his thread of silk.

In this case we laugh at the rustic poet, not with him.

One of the most fruitful of witty devices is a violation of the third law, namely, to treat members of overlapping classes as if they were members of the same class. For example, during a period of riots and social unrest when the mob had set fire to hayricks all over the country Sidney Smith wrote to his friend, Mrs. Meynell:

What do you think of all these burnings'? and have you heard of the new sort of burnings? Ladies' maids have taken to setting their mistresses on fire. Two dow­agers were burned last week, and large rewards are offered. They are inventing litde fire-engines for the toilet table, worked with lavender water.

The fourth law, which distinguishes between the occasions when speech is used to describe concrete things and those in which it is used for abstract purposes, provides an oppor­tunity for wit, as in Wilde's epigram:

Twenty years of romance make a woman look like a ruin, and twenty years of marriage make her look like a public building.

Ruin has become a "dead" metaphor, that is to say, a word which normally can be used as an abstraction, but public building is still a concrete description.

Literary Parody, and Visual Caricature

Literary parody presupposes a) that every authentic writer has a unique perspective on life and b) that his literary style accurately expresses that perspective. The trick of the parodist is to take the unique style of the author, how he ex­presses his unique vision, and make it express utter banal­ities; what the parody expresses could be said by anyone. The effect is of a reversal in the relation between the author and his style. Instead of the style being the creation of the man, the man becomes the puppet of the style. It is only possible to caricature an author one admires because, in the case of an author one dislikes, his own work will seem a better parody than one could hope to write oneself.

Example: As we get older we do not get any younger.

Seasons return, and to-day I am fifty-five, And this time last year I was fifty-four, And this time next year I shall be sixty-two. And I cannot say I should like (to speak for myself)

To see my time over again—if you can call it time:

Fidgeting uneasily under a draughty stair, Or counting sleepless nights in the crowded tube.

(henry reed, Chard Whitlow

Every face is a present witness to the fact that its owner has a past behind him which might have been otherwise, and a future ahead of him in which some possibilities are more probable than others. To "read" a face means to guess what it might have been and what it still may become. Chil­dren, for whom most future possibilities are equally prob­able, the dead for whom all possibilities have been reduced to zero, and animals who have only one possibility to realize and realize it completely, do not have faces which can be read, but wear inscrutable masks. A caricature of a face admits that its owner has had a past, but denies that he has a future. He has created his features up to a certain point, but now they have taken charge of him so that he can never change; he has become a single possibility completely realized. That is why, when we go to the zoo, the faces of the animals re­mind one of caricatures of human beings. A caricature doesn't need to be read; it has no future.

We enjoy caricatures of our friends because we do not want to think of their changing, above all, of their dying; we enjoy caricatures of our enemies because we do not want to con­sider the possibility of their having a change of heart so that we would have to forgive them.

Flyting

Flyting seems to have vanished as a studied literary art and only to survive in the impromptu exchanges of truckdrivers and cabdrivers. The comic effect arises from the contradic­tion between the insulting nature of what is said which appears to indicate a passionate relation of hostility and agres­sion, and the calculated skill of verbal invention which in­dicates that the protagonists are not thinking about each other but about language and their pleasure in employing it inventively. A man who is really passionately angry is speech­less and can only express his anger by physical violence. Playful anger is intrinsically comic because, of all emotions, anger is the least compatible with play.

Satire

The object of satire is a person who, though in possession of his moral faculties, transgresses the moral law beyond the normal call of temptation. The lunatic cannot be an object of satire, since he is not morally responsible for his ac­tions, and the wicked man cannot be an object because, while morally responsible, he lacks the normal faculty of conscience. The commonest object of satire is the rogue. The rogue trans­gresses the moral law at the expense of others, but he is only able to do this because of the vices of his victims; they share in his guilt. The wicked man transgresses the moral law at the expense of others, but his victims are innocent. Thus a black marketeer in sugar can be satirized because the ex­istence of such a black market depends upon the greed of others for sugar, which is a pleasure but not a necessity; a black marketeer in penicillin cannot be satirized because, for the sick, it is a necessity and, if they cannot pay his prices, they will die.

After the rogue, the commonest object of satire is the monomaniac. Most men desire money and are not always too scrupulous in the means by which they obtain it, but this does not make them objects of satire, because their desire is tempered by a number of competing interests. A miser is satirizable because his desire overrides all desires which normal selfishness feels, such as sex or physical comfort.

The Satirical Strategy

There is not only a moral human norm, but also a normal way of transgressing it. At the moment of yielding to tempta­tion, the normal human being has to exercise self-deception and rationalization, for in order to yield he requires the illusion of acting with a good conscience: after he has committed the immoral act, when desire is satisfied, the normal human being realizes the nature of his act and feels guilty. He who is incapable of realizing the nature of his act is mad, and he who, both before, while, and after committing it, is ex­actly conscious of what he is doing yet feels no guilt, is wicked.

The commonest satirical devices therefore, are two: i) To present the object of satire as if he or she were mad and unaware of what he is doing.

Now Night descending, the proud scene was o'er, But lived in Settle's numbers, one day more.

(pope.)

The writing of poetry which, even in the case of the worst of poets, is a personal and voluntary act, is presented as if it were as impersonal and necessary as the revolution of the earth, and the value of the poems so produced which, even in a bad poet, varies, is presented as invariable and therefore subject to a quantitative measurement like dead matter.

The satiric effect presupposes that the reader knows that in real life Setde was not a certifiable lunatic, for lunacy over­whelms a man against his will: Settle is, as it were, a self- made lunatic.

2,) To present the object of satire as if he or she were wicked and completely conscious of what he is doing without feeling any guilt.

Although, dear Lord, I am a sinner,

I have done no major crime;

Now I'll come to Evening Service

Whensoever I have time.

So, Lord, reserve for me a crown,

And do not let my shares go down.

(John Betjeman.)

Again, the satiric effect depends upon our knowing that in real life the lady is not wicked, that, if she were really as truthful with herself as sh.e is presented, she could not go to Church.

Satire flourishes in a homogeneous society where satirist and audience share the same views as to how normal people can be expected to behave, and in times of relative stability and contentment, for satire cannot deal with serious evil and suffering. In an age like our own, it cannot flourish except in intimate circles as an expression of private feuds: in public life the evils and sufferings are so serious that satire seems trivial and the only possible kind of attack is prophetic de­nunciation.

DON JUAN

Hort ihr Kindeslieder singen, Gleich ists euer eigner Scherz; Seht ihr mich im Takte springen, Hiipft euch elterlich das Herz.

faust, Part II, Act III

Most of the literary works with which we are acquainted fall into one of two classes, those we have no desire to read a second time—sometimes, we were never able to finish them— and those we are always happy to reread. There are a few, however, which belong to a third class; we do not feel like reading one of them very often but, when we are in the appropriate mood, it is the only work we feel like reading. Nothing else, however good or great, will do instead.

For me, Byron's Don Juan is such a work. In trying to an­alyze why this should be so, I find helpful a distinction which, so far as I have been able to discover, can only be made in the English language, the distinction between saying, "So- and-so or such-and-such is boring," and saying, "So-and-so or such-and-such is a bore."

In English, I believe, the adjective expresses a subjective judgment; boring always means boring-to-me. For example, if I am in the company of golf enthusiasts, I find their con­versation boring but they find it fascinating. The noun, on the other hand, claims to be an objective, universally valid statement; X is a bore is either true or false.

Applied to works of art or to artists, the distinction makes four judgments possible.

1) Not Cor seldom) boring but a bore. Exam-pies: The last quartets of Beethoven, the Sistine frescoes of Michelangelo, the novels of Dostoievski. 2.) Sometimes boring but not a bore. Verdi, Degas, Shakespeare.

Not boring and not a bore. Rossini, the drawings of Thurber, P. G. Wodehouse.

Boring and a bore. Works to which one cannot attend. It would be rude to give names.

Perhaps the principle of the distinction can be made clearer by the following definitions:

The absolutely boring but absolutely not a bore: the time of day.

The absolutely not boring but absolute bore: God.

Don Juan is sometimes boring but pre-eminently an example of a long poem which is not a bore. To enjoy it fully, the reader must be in a mood of distaste for everything which is to any degree a bore, that is, for all forms of passionate attachment, whether to persons, things, actions or beliefs.

This is not a mood in which one can enjoy satire, for satire, however entertaining, has its origin in passion, in anger at what is the case, desire to change what is the case into what ought to be the case, and belief that the change is humanly possible. The Dunciad, for example, presupposes that the God­dess of Dullness is a serious enemy of civilization, that it is the duty of all good citizens to rally to the defense of the

City against her servants, and that the cause of Common- sense is not hopeless.

In defending his poem against the charge of immorality, Byron said on one occasion: "Don Juan will be known bye- a-bye for what it is intended—a Satire on abuses of the present state of Society": but he was not telling the truth. The poem, of course, contains satirical passages. When Byron attacks Wordsworth, Southey or Wellington, he is certainly hoping to deprive them of readers and admirers and behind his description of the siege of Ismail lies a hope that love of military glory and adulation of the warrior are not incurable defects in human nature but evils against which the con­science of mankind can, in the long run, be persuaded to revolt.

But, as a whole, Don Jvum is not a satire but a comedy, and Byron knew it, for in a franker mood he wrote to Murray:

I have no plan—I had no plan; but I had or have mate­rials; though if, like Tony Lumpkin, I am to be "snubbed so when I am in spirits," the poem will be naught and the poet turn serious again . . . You are too earnest and eager about a work which was never intended to be serious. Do you suppose that I could have any intention but to giggle and make giggle.

Satire and comedy both make use of the comic contradiction, but their aims are different. Satire would arouse in readers the desire to act so that the contradictions disappear; comedy would persuade them to accept the contradictions with good humor as facts of life against which it is useless to rebel.

Poor Julia's heart was in an awkward state,

She felt it going and resolved to make The noblest efforts for herself and mate,

For honour's, pride's, religion's, virtue's sake; Her resolutions were most truly great;

And almost might have made a Tarquin quake; She prayed the Virgin Mary for her grace As being the best judge in a lady's case.

She vow'd she never would see Juan more

And next day paid a visit to his mother; And looked extremely at the opening door,

Which by the Virgin's grace, let in another; Grateful she was, and yet a little sore—

Again it opens—it can be no other. "Tis surely Juan now—No! I'm afraid That night the Virgin was no longer prayed.

Julia is presented, neither as a pious hypocrite nor as a slut, but as a young woman, married to an older man she does not like, tempted to commit adultery with an attractive boy. The conflict between her conscience and her desire is per­fectly genuine. Byron is not saying that it is silly of Julia to pray because there is no God, or that marriage is an unjust institution which should be abolished in favor of free love. The comedy lies in the fact that the voice of conscience and the voice of desire can both be expressed in the verbal form of a prayer, so that, while Julia's conscience is praying to the Madonna, her heart is praying to Aphrodite. Byron does not pass judgment on this; he simply states that human nature is like that and implies, perhaps, that, in his experience, if Aphrodite has opportunity on her side, the Madonna is seldom victorious, so that, in sexual matters, we ought to be tolerant of human frailty.

Byron's choice of the word giggle rather than laugh to describe his comic intention deserves consideration.

All comic situations show a contradiction between some general or universal principle and an individual or particular person or event. In the case of the situation at which we giggle, the general principles are two:

x) The sphere of the sacred and the sphere of the

profane are mutually exclusive.

2,) The sacred is that at which we do not laugh.

Now a situation arises in which the profane intrudes upon the sacred but without annulling it. If the sacred were an­nulled, we should laugh outright, but the sacred is still felt to be present, so that a conflict ensues between the desire to laugh and the feeling that laughter is inappropriate. A per­son to whom the distinction between the sacred and the pro­fane had no meaning could never giggle.

If we giggle at Julia's prayer, it is because we have been brought up in a culture which makes a distinction between sacred and profane love. Similarly, we miss the comic point if we read die following lines as a satire on Christian dogma.

as I suffer from the shocks of illness, I grow much more orthodox.

The first attack at once proved the Divinity;

(But that I never doubted, nor the Devil); The next, the Virgin's mystical Virginity;

The third, the usual Origin of Evil; The fourth at once established the whole Trinity

On so uncontrovertible a level, That I devoutly wished the three were four On purpose to believe so much the more.

If these lines were satirical, they would imply that all people in good health are atheists. But what Byron says is that when people are well, they tend to be frivolous and forget all those questions about the meaning of life which are of sacred im­portance to everybody, including atheists, and that when they are ill, they can think of nothing else. One could imagine a similar verse by Shelley (if he had had any sense of humor) in which he would say: "The iller I get, the more certain I become that there is no God." Shelley, as a matter of fact, complained that he was powerless "to eradicate from his friend's great mind the delusions of Christianity which in spite of his reason seem perpetually to recur and to lie in ambush for his hours of sickness and distress," and, had Bryon lived longer, the prophecy Sir Walter Scott made in 1815 might well have come true.

I remember saying to him that I really thought that, if he lived a few years longer, he would alter his senti­ments. He answered rather sharply. "I suppose you are one of those who prophesy that I will turn Methodist." I replied—"No. I don't expect your conversion to be of such an ordinary kind. I would rather look to see you retreat upon the Catholic faith and distinguish yourself by the austerity of your penances."

The terms "sacred" and "profane" can be used relatively as well as absolutely. Thus, in a culture that puts a spiritual value upon love between the sexes, such a love, however physical, will seem sacred in comparison with physical hunger. When the shipwrecked Juan wakes and sees Haidee bending over him, he sees she is beautiful and is thrilled by her voice, but the first thing he longs for is not her love but a beef­steak.

The sacred can be evil as well as good. In our culture it is considered normal (the normal is always profane) for men to be carnivorous, and vegetarians are looked upon as cranks.

Although his anatomical construction Bears vegetables in a grumbling way, Your laboring people think beyond all question Beef, veal, and mutton better for digestion.

Cannibalism, on the other hand, is a crime which is regarded with sacred horror. The survivors from the shipwreck in Canto II are not only starving but also have a craving for meat to which their upbringing has conditioned them. Unfortunately, the only kind of meat available is human. One can imagine a group of men in similar circumstances who would not have become cannibals because they had been brought up in a vegetarian culture and were unaware that human beings could eat meat. The men in Byron's poem pay with their lives for their act, not because it is a sacred crime but for the profane reason that their new diet proves indigestible.

By night chilled, by day scorched, there one by one

They perished until withered to a few, But chiefly by a species of self-slaughter In washing down Pedrillo with salt water.

It is the silly mistake of drinking salt water, not the sacred crime of consuming a clergyman, that brings retribution.

Most readers will probably agree that the least interesting figure in Don Juan is its official hero, and his passivity is all the more surprising when one recalls the legendary monster of depravity after whom he is named. The Don Juan of the myth is not promiscuous by nature but by will; seduction is his vocation. Since the slightest trace of affection will turn a number on his list of victims into a name, his choice of vocation requires the absolute renunciation of love. It is an essential element in the legend, therefore, that Don Juan be, not a sinner out of weakness, but a defiant atheist, the demonic counter-image of the ascetic saint who renounces all personal preference for one neighbor to another in order that he may show Christian charity to all alike.

When he chose the name Don Juan for his hero, Byron was well aware of the associations it would carry for the public, and he was also aware that he himself was believed by many to be the heardess seducer and atheist of the legend. His poem is, among other things, a self-defense. He is saying to his accusers, as it were: "The Don Juan of the legend does not exist. I will show you what the sort of man who gets the reputation for being a Don Juan is really like."

Byron's hero is not even particularly promiscuous. In the course of two years he makes love with five women, a poor showing in comparison with the 1003 Spanish ladies of Leporello's Catalogue aria, or even with Byron's own "zoo odd Venetian pieces." Furthermore, he seduces none of them. In three cases he is seduced—by Julia, Catherine, the Duch­ess of Fitz-Fulk—and in the other two, circumstances outside his control bring him together with Haidee and Dudil, and no persuasion on his part is needed. Then, though he can­not quite play Tristan to her Isolde and commit suicide when he is parted from Haidee, he has been genuinely in love with her.

Far from being a defiant rebel against the laws of God and man, his most conspicuous trait is his gift for social conformity. I cannot understand those critics who have seen in him a kind of Rousseau child of Nature. Whenever chance takes him, to a pirate's lair, a harem in Mohammedan Con­stantinople, a court in Greek Orthodox Russia, a country house in Protestant England, he immediately adapts himself and is accepted as an agreeable fellow. Had Byron con­tinued the poem as he planned and taken Juan to Italy to be a cavaliere servente and to Germany to be a solemn Werther-faced man, one has no doubt that he would have continued to play the roles assigned to him with tact and aplomb. In some respects Juan resembles the Baudelairian dandy but he lacks the air of insolent superiority which Baudelaire considered essential to the true dandy; he would never, one feels, say anything outrageous or insulting. Aside from the stylistic impossibility of ending a comic poem on a serious note, it is impossible to imagine Juan, a man without enemies, ending on the guillotine, as apparently Byron was considering doing with him.

When one compares Don Juan with what we know of his creator, he seems to be a daydream of what Byron would have liked to be himself. Physically he is unblemished and one cannot imagine him having to diet to keep his figure; socially, he is always at his ease and his behavior in perfect taste. Had Juan set out for Greece, he would not have had made for him­self two Homeric helmets with overtowering plumes nor had engraved on his coat of arms the motto Crede Don Juan.

Byron, though very conscious of his rank, never felt fully at ease in the company of his social equals (Shelley was too odd to count). Even when he was the social lion of London, Lord Holland observed:

It was not from his birth that Lord Byron had taken the station he held in society for, till his talents were known, he was, in spite of his birth, in anything but good society and but for his talents would never, perhaps, have been in any better.

And Byron himself confessed to Lady Blessington:

I am so little fastidious in the selection or rather want of selection of associates, that the most stupid men satisfy me as well, nay, perhaps, better than the most brilliant. The effort of letting myself down to them costs me noth­ing, though my pride is hurt that they do not seem more sensible of the condescension.

Juan, though by birth a Spaniard and a Catholic and there­fore an outsider from an Englishman's point of view, is the perfect embodiment of the very English ideal of succeeding at anything he does without appearing to be ambitious of suc­cess.

Characters which are daydream projections of their authors are seldom very interesting and, had Byron written Don Juan as a straightforward narrative poem in the style of The Corsair or Lara, it would probably have been unreadable. Fortunately, he had discovered a genre of poetry which allows the author to enter the story he is telling. Juan is only a convenience: the real hero of the poem is Byron himself.

Byron's poetry is the most striking example I know in literary history of the creative role which poetic form can play. If William Stewart Rose had arrived in Venice in September 1817 with nothing for him but magnesia and red tooth powder, Byron would probably today be considered a very minor poet. He knew Italian well, he had read Casti's Novelle Galanti and loved them, but he did not realize the poetic possibilities of the mock-heroic ottava-rima until he read Frere's The Monks and the Giants.

Take away the poems he wrote in this style and meter, Beppo, The Vision of Judgment, Don Juan, and what is left of lasting value? A few lyrics, though none of them is as good as the best of Moore's, two adequate satires though inferior to Dryden or Pope, "Darkness," a fine piece of blank verse marred by some false sentiment, a few charming occasional pieces, half a dozen stanzas from Childe Harold, half a dozen lines from Cain, and that is all. Given his production up till that date, he showed better judgment than his readers when he wrote to Moore in 1817:

If I live ten years longer, you will see, however, that all is not over with me—I don't mean in literature, for that is nothing: and it may seem odd enough to say I do not think it is my vocation.

Soon afterwards, he read Frere: as he had foretold, it was not all over with him but, as he had not foreseen, his vocation was to be literature. The authentic poet was at last released.

So long as Byron tried to write Poetry with a capital P, to express deep emotions and profound thoughts, his work de­served that epithet he most dreaded, una seccatura. As a thinker he was, as Goethe perceived, childish, and he possessed neither the imaginative vision—he could never invent anything, only remember—nor the verbal sensibility such poetry demands. Lady Byron, of all people, put her finger on his great defect as a serious poet.

He is the absolute monarch of words, and uses them as Bonaparte did lives, for conquest without regard to their intrinsic value.

The artistic failure of Childe Harold is due in large measure to Byron's disastrous choice of the Spenserian stanza. At the time, he had only read a few verses of The Faerie Queene and when, later, Leigh Hunt tried to make him read the whole of it, one is not surprised to learn that he hated the poem. Nothing could be further removed from Byron's cast of mind than its slow, almost timeless, visionary quality.

His attempt to write satirical heroic couplets were less un­successful but, aside from the impossibility of equaling Dryden and Pope in their medium, Byron was really a comedian, not a satirist. Funny things can be said in heroic couplets, but the heroic couplet as a form is not comic, that is to say, it does not itself make what it says funny.

Before Beppo, the authentic Byron emerges only in light occasional verse such as "Lines to a Lady who appointed a night in December to meet him in the garden."

Why should you weep like Lydia Languish And fret with self-created anguish

Or doom the lover you have chosen On winter nights to sigh half-frozen; In leafless shades to sue for pardon, Only because the scene's a garden? For gardens seem, by one consent, Since Shakespeare set the precedent, Since Julia first declared her passion, To form the place of assignation, Oh, would some modern muse inspire And seat her by a sea-coal fire; Or had the bard at Christmas written And laid the scene of love in Britain, He, surely, in commiseration Had changed the place of declaration. In Italy I've no objection, Warm nights are proper for reflection: But here our climate is so rigid That love itself is rather frigid: Think on our chilly situation, And curb this rage for imitation.

In this, a very early poem, one can note already the speed and the use of feminine rhymes which were to become Byron's forte. Feminine rhymes are as possible in a five-foot line as in a four-foot but, at this date, the tune of the Pope couplet was still too much in his ear to allow him to use them. There are only three couplets with feminine rhymes in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers and only one in Hints from Horace.

Frere was not a great poet, but his perception of the comic possibilities of an exact imitation in English of Italian ottava- rima was a stroke of genius. Italian is a polysyllabic language, most of its words end on an unaccented syllable and rhymes are very common. Italian ottava-rima, therefore, is usually hendecasyllabic with feminine rhymes and, because three rhymes can be found without any effort, it became a maid-of- all-work stanza which would fit any subject. An Italian poet could use it for comic or satirical purposes, but he could also

be serious and pathetic in it. There is nothing comic, for ex­ample, about this stanza from Gerusalemme Liberata.

Lei nel partir, lei nel tornar del sole Chiama con voce mesta e prega e flora; Come usignol cut villan duro invole Dal nido i figli non pennuti ancora Che in miserabil canto afflite e sole Piange le notte, e n'empie, boschi e Vara. Alfin col nuovo di rinchiude alquanto I lumi; e il sonno in lor serpe fra il pianto.

When English poets first copied the stanza, they instinctively shortened the lines to decasyllabics with masculine rhymes.

All suddenly dismaid, and hardess quite He fled abacke and catching hastie holde Of a young alder hard behinde him pight, It rent, and streight aboute him gan beholde What God or Fortune would assist his might. But whether God or Fortune made him bold It's hard to read; yet hardie will he had To overcome, that made him less adrad.

("Vergil's Gnat.")

The frequent monosyllables, the abruptness of the line end­ings and the absence of elision completely alter the movement. Further, because of the paucity of rhymes in English, it is al­most impossible to write a poem of any length in this stanza without either using banal rhymes or padding the line in order to get a rhyme. If, from Chaucer to Sackville, it was not ottava-rima but rhyme-royal which was the staple vehicle for a long poem, one reason, at least, was that rhyme-royal calls for only one rhyme triplet, not two. So far as I know, the first English poet to combine ottava-rima with the high style was Yeats who, in his later years, wrote many of his finest poems in it. He gets round the rhyming problem by a liberal use of half-rhymes and by ending lines with words which are almost dactyls, so that the rhyming syllable is only lighdy ac­cented. For example, in the opening stanza of "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen," only two of the lines rhyme exactly.

Many ingenious lovely things are gone That seemed sheer miracle to the multitude, Protected from the circle of the moon That pitches common things about. There stood Amid the ornamental bronze and stone An ancient image made of olive wood— And gone are Phidias' famous ivories And all the golden grasshoppers and bees.

Frere was the first fully to realize (though, as W. P. Ker has pointed out, there are anticipations in Gay's "Mr. Pope's Welcome from Greece") that the very qualities of the stanza which make it an unsuitable vehicle for serious poetry make it an ideal one for comic verse since in English, unlike Italian, the majority of double or triple rhymes are comic.

Our association of the word romantic with the magical and dreamlike is so strong that we are apt to forget that the literary period so classified is also a great age for comic poetry. The comic verse of poets like Canning, Frere, Hood, Praed, Bar- ham, and Lear was a new departure in English poetry, and not least in its exploitation of comic rhyme. Indeed, before them, the only poets I can think of who used it intentionally and frequently were Skelton and Samuel Butler.

The very qualities of English ottava-rima which force a serious poet to resort to banal rhymes and padding are a stimu­lus to the comic imagination, leading to the discovery of comic rhymes and providing opportunities for the interpolated com­ment and conversational aside, and Byron developed this deliberate looseness of manner to the full.

An Arab horse, a stately stag, a barb New broke, a camelopard, a gazelle.

No—none of these will do—and then their garb! Their veil and petticoat—Alas! to dwell

Upon such things would very near absorb A canto—then their feet and ankles—well,

Thank heaven I've got no metaphor quite ready, (And so, my sober Muse—come, let's be steady.)

He also exploited to the full the structural advantages of the stanza. As a unit, eight lines give space enough to describe a single event or elaborate on a single idea without having to run on to the next stanza. If, on the other hand, what the poet has to say requires several short sentences, the arrangement of the rhymes allows him to pause at any point he likes without the stanza breaking up into fragments, for his separate statements will always be linked by a rhyme. The stanza divides by rhyme into a group of six lines followed by a coda of two; the poet can either observe this division and use the couplet as an epigrammatic comment on the first part, or he can take seven lines for his theme and use the final one as a punch line. Gulbeyaz, for the first time in her days,

Was much embarrassed, never having met In all her life with aught save prayers and praise;

And as she also risked her life to get Him whom she meant to tutor in love's ways

Into a comfortable tete-a-tete, To lose the hour would make her quite a martyr. And they had wasted now about a quarter.

Her form had all the softness of her sex,

Her features all the sweetness of the devil, When he put on the cherub to perplex

Eve, and paved (God knows what) the road to evil; The sun himself was scarce more free from specks

Than she from aught at which the eye could cavil; Yet, somehow, there was something somewhere wanting, As if she rather ordered than was granting.

What had been Byron's defect as a serious poet, his lack of reverence for words, was a virtue for the comic poet. Serious poetry requires that the poet treat words as if they were per­sons, but comic poetry demands that he treat them as things and few, if any, English poets have rivaled Byron's ability to put words through the hoops.

Needless to say, the skill of the comic poet, like that of the lion tamer or the clown, takes hard work to perfect. Byron chose to give others the impression that he dashed off his poetry, like a gentleman, without effort, but the publication of the Variorum edition of Don Juan demonstrates that, al­though he wrote with facility, he took a great deal more pains than he pretended. The editors, with an industrious devotion which is as admirable as it is, to me, incredible, have provided statistical tables. Thus, 87 out of the 172, stanzas in Canto I show revisions in four or more lines, and 123 revisions in the concluding couplet. A few examples will suffice.

Canto I, st. 103. First draft:

They are a sort of post-house, where the Fates Change horses every hour from night till noon; Then spur away with empires and oe'r states, Leaving no vestige but a bare chronology, Except the hopes derived from true theology.

First Revision:

Except the promises derived from true theology. Final version:

They are a sort of post-house where the Fates Change horses, making history change its tune; Then spur away o'er empires and o'er states, Leaving at last not much besides chronology Excepting the post-obits of theology.

Canto IX, st. 33. First draft:

O ye who build up statues all defiled

With gore, like Nadir Shah, that costive Sophy,

Who after leaving Hindostan a wild,

And leaving Asia scarce a cup of coffee,

To soothe his woes withal, went mad and was

Killed because what he swallowed would not pass.

Final version:

O! ye who build up monuments defiled With gore, like Nadir Shah, that costive Sophy Who, after leaving Hindostan a wild, And scarce to the Mogul a cup of coffee, To soothe his woes withal, was slain—the sinner! Because he could no more digest his dinner.

Canto XI, st. 60.

First version:

'Tis strange the mind should let such phrases quell its Chief impulse with a few frail paper pellets.

Second Version:

'Tis strange the mind, that all celestial Particle, Should let itself be put out by an Article. Final Version:

'Tis strange the mind, that very fiery Particle, Should let itself be snuffed out by an Article.

One should be wary, when comparing an author's various productions, of saying: this piece is an expression of the real man and that piece is not—for nobody, not even the subject himself, can be certain who he is. All we can say is that this piece is the expression of a person who might possibly exist but nobody could possibly exist of whom that piece would be the expression.

There have been poets—Keats is the most striking example —whose letters and poems are so different from each other that they might have been written by two different people, and yet both seem equally authentic. But, with Byron, this is not the case. From the beginning, his letters seem authentic but, before Beppo, very litde of his poetry; and the more closely his poetic persona comes to resemble the epistolary persona of his letters to his male friends—his love letters are another matter—the more authentic his poetry seems.

So Scrope is gone—down diddled—as Doug K writes it, the said Doug being like the man who, when he lost a

friend, went down to St. James Coffee House and took a new one; 'the best of men'. Gone to Bruges where he will get tipsy with Dutch beer and shoot himself the first foggy morning.

Reading this letter to Hobhouse, one immediately recognizes its likeness to Don Juan and its unlikeness to Manfred and one feels that, while the letter and Don Juan have been written by someone-in-particular, Manfred must have been written, as it were, by a committee.

If one can say that the authentic poet in Byron is Byron the Friend, it is worth asking what are the typical characteristics of friendship. (I am thinking, of course, of friendship between men. To me, as to all men, the nature of friendship between women remains a mystery, which is probably a wise provision of nature. If we ever discovered what women say to each other when we are not there, our male vanity might receive such a shock that the human race would die out.)

The basis of friendship is similarity: it is only possible be­tween persons who regard each other as equals and who have some interests and tastes in common, so that they can share each other's experiences. We can speak of a false friendship but not of an unreciprocated one. In this, friendship differs from sexual love which is based on difference and is all too often unreciprocated. Further, friendship is a nonexclusive, nonpossessive relationship; we can speak of having friends in common, while we cannot speak of having lovers, husbands or wives in common. Between two friends, therefore, there is an indifference towards, even an impatience with, those areas of human experience which they cannot share with each other, religious experiences, for example, which are unsharable with anybody, and feelings of passionate devotion which can be shared, if at all, only with the person for whom they are felt. Andre Gide was being unduly cynical, perhaps, when he de­fined a friend as someone with whom one does something dis­graceful; it is true, however, that a vice in common can be the ground of a friendship but not a virtue in common. X and Y may be friends because they are both drunkards or woman­izers but, if they are both sober and chaste, they are friends for some other reason.

The experiences which friends can share range from the grossest to the most subtle and refined, but nearly all of them belong to the category of the Amusing. No lover worries about boring his beloved; if she loves him, she cannot be bored and if she doesn't love him, he is too unhappy to care if she is. But between two friends, their first concern is not to bore each other. If they are persons of heart and imagination, they will take it for granted that the other has beliefs and feelings which he takes seriously and problems of his own which cause him suffering and sorrow, but in conversation they will avoid discussing them or, if they do discuss them, they will avoid the earnest note. One laughs with a friend; one does not weep with him (though one may weep for him).

Most poetry is the utterance of a man in some state of passion, love, joy, grief, rage, etc., and no doubt this is as it should be. But no man is perpetually in a passion and those states in which he is amused and amusing, detached and ir­reverent, if less important, are no less human. If there were no poets who, like Byron, express these states, Poetry would lack something.

An authentic and original work nearly always shocks its first readers and Byron's "new manner" was no exception.

Beppo is just imported but not perused. The greater the levity of Lord Byron's Compositions, the more I imagine him to suffer from the turbid state of his mind.

(Lady Byron.)

Frere particularly observed that the world had now given up the foolish notion that you were to be identified with your sombre heroes, and had acknowledged with what great success and good keeping you had por­trayed a grand imaginary being. But the same admiration cannot be bestowed upon, and will not be due to the Rake Juan. . . . All the idle stories about your Venetian life will be more than confirmed. (Hobhouse.)

Dear Adorable Lord Byron, don't make a more coarse old libertine of yourself . . . When you don't feel quite up to a spirit of benevolence . . . throw away your pen, my love, and take a little calomel. (Hariette Wilson, who shordy afterwards offered to come and pimp for him.)

I ■would rather have the fame of Childe Harold for THREE YEARS than an IMMORTALITY of Don Juan.

(Teresa Guiccoli.)

Some of his friends, among them Hobhouse, admired parts of Don Juan, but the only person who seems to have realized how utterly different in kind it was from all Byron's previous work was John Lockhart:

Stick to Don Juan; it is the only sincere thing you have ever written . . . out of all sight the best of your works; it is by far the most spirited, the most straightforward, the most interesting, and the most poetical . . . the great charm of its style, is that it is not much like the style of any other poem in the world.

Byron was not normally given to praising his own work, but of Don Juan he was openly proud:

Of the fate of the "pome" I am quite uncertain, and do not anticipate much brilliancy from your silence. But I do not care. I am as sure as the Archbishop of Granada that I never wrote better, and I wish you all better taste.

As to "Don Juan," confess, confess—you dog be candid— that it is the sublime of that there sort of writing—it may be bawdy but is it not good English? It may be profli­gate, but is it not life, is it not the thing? Could any man have written it who has not lived in the world?— and tooled in a post-chaise?—in a hackney coach?—in a gondola?—against a wall?—in a court carriage?—in a vis­a-vis?—on a table?—and under it?

There is an element of swank in this description, for the poem is far less bawdy than he makes it sound. Only a small part of the experience upon which Byron drew in writing it was amorous.

What Byron means by life—which explains why he could never appreciate Wordsworth or Keats—is the motion of life, the passage of events and thoughts. His visual descriptions of scenery or architecture are not particularly vivid, nor are his portrayal of states of mind particularly profound, but at the description of things in motion or the way in which the mind wanders from one thought to another he is a great master.

Unlike most poets, he must be read very rapidly as if the words were single frames in a movie film; stop on a word or a line and the poetry vanishes—the feeling seems superficial, the rhyme forced, the grammar all over the place—but read at the proper pace, it gives a conviction of watching the real thing which many profounder writers fail to inspire for, though motion is not the only characteristic of life, it is an es­sential one.

If Byron was sometimes slipshod in his handling of the language, he was a stickler for factual accuracy; "I don't care one lump of sugar," he once wrote, "for my poetry; but for my costume, and my correctness ... I will combat lustily," and, on another occasion, "I hate things all -fiction . . . There should always be some foundation of fact for the most airy fabric, and pure invention is but the talent of a liar." He was furious when the poem "Pilgrimage to Jerusalem" was attributed to him: "How the devil should I write about Jerusalem, never having been yet there?" And he pounced, with justice, on Wordsworth's lines about Greece:

Rivers, fertile plains, and sounding shores, Under a cope of variegated sky.

The rivers are dry half the year, the plains are barren, and the shores as "still" and "tideless" as the Mediter­ranean can make them; the sky is anything but varie­gated, being for months and months "darkly, deeply, beautifuly blue."

The material of his poems is always drawn from events that actually happened, either to himself or to people he knew, and he took great trouble to get his technical facts, such as sea terms, correct.

When he stopped work on Don Juan, he had by no means exhausted his experience. Reading through Professor Mar- chand's recent biography, one comes across story after story that seems a natural for the poem; Caroline Lamb, for ex­ample, surrounded by little girls in white, burning effigies of Byron's pictures and casting into the flames copies of his letters because she could not bear to part with the originals; Byron himself, at Shelley's cremation, getting acutely sun­burned, and Teresa preserving a piece of skin when he peeled; Teresa forbidding an amateur performance of Othello because she couldn't speak English and wasn't going to have anybody else play Desdemona. And, if Byron's shade is still interested in writing, there are plenty of posthumous incidents. The Greeks stole his lungs as a relic and then lost them; at his funeral, noble carriage after noble carriage lumbered by, all empty, because the aristocracy felt they must show some re­spect to a fellow-peer but did not dare seem to show approval of his politics or his private life; Fletcher, his valet, started a macaroni factory and failed; Teresa married a French marquis who used to introduce her as "La Marquise de Boissy, ma femme, ancienne maitresse de Byron" and after his death maltresse devoted herself to spiritualism, talking with the spirits of both Byron and her first husband. What stanzas they could all provide! How suitable, too, for a that-there poet that the room in which his "Memoirs" were burned should now be called the Byron Room, how perfect the scene John Buchan describes of himself and Henry James setting down to examine the archives of Lady Lovelace:

.. . during a summer weekend, Henry James and I waded through masses of ancient indecency, and duly wrote an opinion . . . My colleague never turned a hair. His only words for some special vileness were "singular"—"most curious"—"nauseating, perhaps, but how quite inexpress­ibly significant."

DINGLEY DELL & THE FLEET

To become mature is to recover that sense of seriousness which one had as a child at flay.

F. W. NIETZSCHE

All characters who are products of the mythopeoic imagination are instantaneously recognizable by the fact that their exist­ence is not defined by their social and historial context; trans­fer them to another society or another age and their characters and behavior will remain unchanged. In consequence, once they have been created, they cease to be their author's char­acters and become the reader's; he can continue their story for himself.

Anna Karenina is not such a character for the reader can­not imagine her apart from the particular milieu in which Tolstoi places her or the particular history of her life which he records; Sherlock Holmes, on the other hand, is: every reader, according to his fancy, can imagine adventures for him which Conan Doyle forgot, as it were, to tell us.

Tolstoi was a very great novelist, Conan Doyle a very minor one, yet it is the minor not the major writer who possesses the mythopoeic gift. The mythopoeic imagination is only accidentally related, it would seem, to the talent for literary expression; in Cervantes' Don Quixote they are found together, in Rider Haggard's She literary talent is largely absent. Indeed, few of the writers whom we call great have created mythical characters. In Shakespeare's plays we find five, Prospero, Ariel, Caliban, Falstaff and Hamlet, and Ham­let is a myth for actors only; the proof that, for actors, he is a myth is that all of them without exception, irrespective of age, build, or even sex, wish to play the part.

After Cervantes, as a writer who combines literary talent and a mythopoeic imagination, comes Dickens and, of his many mythical creations, Mr. Pickwick is one of the most memorable. Though the appeal of mythical characters trans­cends all highbrow-lowbrow frontiers of taste, it is not un­limited; every such character is symbolic of some important and perpetual human concern, but a reader must have ex­perienced this concern, even if he cannot define it to himself, before the character can appeal to him. Judging by my own experience, I would say that Pickwick Papers is emphatically not a book for children and the reflections which follow are the result of my asking myself: "Why is it that I now read with such delight a book which, when I was given it to read as a boy, I found so boring, although it apparently contains nothing which is too 'grown-up' for a twelve-year-old?" The conclusion I have come to is that the real theme of Pickwick Papers—I am not saying Dickens was consciously aware of it and, indeed, I am pretty certain he was not—is the Fall of Man. It is the story of a man who is innocent, that is to say, who has not eaten of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and is, therefore, living in Eden. He then eats of the Tree, that is to say, he becomes conscious of the reality of Evil but, instead of falling from innocence into sin—this is what makes him a mythical character—he changes from an innocent child into an innocent adult who no longer lives in an imaginary Eden of his own but in the real and fallen world.

If my conclusion is correct, it explains why Pickwick Papers said nothing to me as a boy because, though no boy is inno­cent, he has no clear notion of innocence, nor does he know that to be no longer innocent, but to wish that one were, is part of the definition of an adult.

However he accounts for it, every adult knows that he lives in a world where, though some are more fortunate than others, no one can escape physical and mental suffering, a world where everybody experiences some degree of contradic­tion between what he desires to do and what his conscience tells him he ought to do or others will allow him to do. Every­body wishes that this world were not like that, that he could live in a world where desires would conflict neither with each other nor with duties nor with the laws of nature, and a great number of us enjoy imagining what such a world would be like.

Our dream pictures of the Happy Place where suffering and evil are unknown are of two kinds, the Edens and the New Jerusalems. Though it is possible for the same individual to imagine both, it is unlikely that his interest in both will be equal and I suspect that between the Arcadian whose favorite daydream is of Eden, and the Utopian whose favorite daydream is of New Jerusalem there is a characterological gulf as unbridgeable as that between Blake's Prolifics and Devourers.

In their relation to the actual fallen world, the difference between Eden and New Jerusalem is a temporal one. Eden is a past world in which the contradictions of the present world have not yet arisen; New Jerusalem is a future world in which they have at last been resolved. Eden is a place where its inhabitants may do whatever they like to do; the motto over its gate is, "Do what thou wilt is here the Law." New Jeru­salem is a place where its inhabitants like to do whatever they ought to do, and its motto is, "In His will is our peace."

In neither place is the moral law felt as an imperative; in Eden because the notion of a universal law is unknown, m New Jerusalem because the law is no longer a law-for, com- mantling that we do this and abstain from doing that, but a Iaw-of, like the laws of nature, which describes how, in fact, its inhabitants behave.

To be an inhabitant of Eden, it is absolutely required that one be happy and likable; to become an inhabitant of New Jerusalem it is absolutely required that one be happy and good. Eden cannot be entered; its inhabitants are born there. No unhappy or unlikable individual is ever born there and, should one of its inhabitants become unhappy or un­likable, he must leave. Nobody is born in New Jerusalem but, to enter it, one must, either through one's own acts or by Divine Grace, have become good. Nobody ever leaves New Jerusalem, but the evil or the unredeemed are forever excluded.

The psychological difference between the Arcadian dreamer and the Utopian dreamer is that the backward-looking Arca­dian knows that his expulsion from Eden is an irrevocable fact and that his dream, therefore, is a wish-dream which cannot become real; in consequence, the actions which led to his expulsion are of no concern to his dream. The forward- looking Utopian, on the other hand, necessarily believes that his New Jerusalem is a dream which ought to be realized so that the actions by which it could be realized are a neces­sary element in his dream; it must include images, that is to say, not only of New Jerusalem itself but also images of the Day of Judgment.

Consequently, while neither Eden nor New Jerusalem are places where aggression can exist, the Utopian dream permits indulgence in aggressive fantasies in a way that the Arcadian dream does not. Even Hitler, I imagine, would have defined his New Jerusalem as a world where there are no Jews, not as a world where they are being gassed by the million day after day in ovens, but he was a Utopian, so the ovens had to come in.

How any individual envisages Eden is determined by his temperament, personal history and cultural milieu, but to all dream Edens the following axioms, I believe, apply.

O Eden is a world of pure being and absolute unique­ness. Change can occur but as an instantaneous trans­formation, not through, a process of becoming. Everyone is incomparable.

The self is satisfied whatever it demands; the ego is approved of whatever it chooses.

There is no distinction between the objective and the subjective. What a person appears to others to be is identi­cal with what he is to himself. His name and his clothes are as much his as his body, so that, if he changes them, he turns into someone else.

Space is both safe and free. There are walled gardens but no dungeons, open roads in all directions but no wandering in the wilderness.

Temporal novelty is without anxiety, temporal repeti­tion without boredom.

Whatever the social pattern, each member of society is satisfied according to his conception of his needs. If it is a hierarchical society, all masters are kind and generous, all servants faithful old retainers.

j) Whatever people do, whether alone or in company, is some kind of play. The only motive for an action is the pleasure it gives the actor, and no deed has a goal or an effect beyond itself.

Three kinds of erotic life are possible, though any particular dream of Eden need contain only one. The polymorphous-perverse promiscuous sexuality of child­hood, courting couples whose relation is potential, not actual, and the chastity of natural celibates who are without desire.

Though there can be no suffering or grief, there can be death. If a death occurs, it is not a cause for sorrow —the dead are not missed—but a social occasion for a lovely funeral.

The Serpent, acquaintance with whom results in immediate expulsion—any serious need or desire.

The four great English experts on Eden are Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Ronald Firbank and P. G. Wodehouse.¹

¹N. B. To my surprise, the only creators of Edens during the last three centuries I can think of, have all been English.

If, in comparing their versions of Eden with those of the Ancient World, I call theirs Christian, I am not, of course, asserting anything about their own beliefs. I only mean that their versions presuppose an anthropology for which Christianity is, historically, responsible. Whether it can exist in a society where the influence of Christianty has never been felt or has been eradicated, I do not know. I suspect that works like Pickwick Papers, The Importance of Being Earnest, The Flower Beneath the Foot, and Blandings Castle would bewilder a Russian Communist as much as they would have bewildered an Ancient Greek. The Communist would probably say: "It is incredible that anybody should like people so silly and useless as Mr. Pickwick, Miss Prism, Madame Wetme and Bertie Wooster." The Greek would probably have said: "It is incredible that such people, so plain, middle-aged and untalented, should be happy."

When the Greeks pictured Eden, they thought of it as a place which the gods or Chance might permit to exist. In his tenth Pythian Ode, Pindar describes the life of the Hyperboreans.

Never the Muse is absent from their ways: lyres clash and the flutes cry and everywhere maiden choruses whirling. They bind their hair in golden laurel and take their holiday.

Neither disease nor bitter old age is mixed In their sacred blood; far from labor and battle they live; they escape Nemesis the overjust.

Or it might exist, like the Islands of the Blessed, as a place of rest and reward for dead heroes. The Greek poets speak of it, not as an imaginary poetic world, but as a distant re­gion of the real world which they have not visited but of which they have heard reports. Pindar's description of the Hyperboreans is related to his definition of the difference between gods and men in the sixth Nemean:

There is one

race of men, one race of gods; both have breath of life from a single mother. But sundered power holds us divided, so that the one is nothing, while for the other the brazen sky is established their sure citadel for ever. Yet we have some like­ness in great intelligence or strength to the immortals, though we know not what the day will bring, what

course after nightfall

destiny has written that we must run to the end.

Gods and men do not differ in nature, only in power; the gods are immortal and can do what they like, men are mortal and can never foresee the consequences of their actions. Therefore, the more powerful a man is, the more godlike he becomes. It is possible to conceive of men so gifted by fortune that, like the Hypoboreans, their life would be indistinguishable from that of the gods.

This is a conception natural to a shame-culture in which who a man is is identical with what he does and suffers. The happy man is the fortunate man, and fortune is ob­jectively recognizable; to be fortunate means to be success­ful, rich, powerful, beautiful, admired. When such a culture imagines Eden, therefore, it automatically excludes the weak and the ungifted, children, old people, poor people, ugly people.

The first significant difference between the conception of man held by a shame-culture and that of a guilt-culture is that a guilt-culture distinguishes between what a man is to other men, the self he manifests in his body, his actions, his words, and what he is to himself, a unique ego which is un­changed by anything he does or suffers. In a shame-culture, there is no real difference between statements in the third person and statements in the first; in a guilt-culture, they are totally distinct. In the statement Jones is six feet tall, the predicate qualifies the subject; in the statement I am six feet tall, it does not. It qualifies a self which the subject recog­nizes to be six feet tall; the I has no height.

In a shame-culture, the moral judgment a man passes upon himself is identical with that which others pass on him; the virtue or shamefulness of an act lies in the nature of the act itself, irrespective or the doer's personal intention or responsi­bility. In a guilt-culture, the subject passes moral judgment upon his thoughts and feelings even if they are never real­ized in action, and upon his acts irrespective of whether others know of them or not, approve of them or not.

In a guilt-culture, therefore, there are a special series of first-person propositions in which the predicate does qualify the subject. For example:

I am innocent/guilty I am proud/humble I am penitent/impenitent I am happy/unhappy. CI am in a state of pleasure/pain is not, of course, one of them. Pain and pleasure are states of the self, not of the ego.)

If I make any such assertion, it must be true or false, but no person except myself can know which; there is no way in which, from observing me, another can come to any conclu­sion.

A writer brought up in a Christian society who would de­scribe Eden has, therefore, to cope with a problem which his pagan predecessors were spared. As an artist he can only deal in the manifest and objective—his Eden, like the pagan one, must be a fortunate place where there is no suffering and everybody has a good time—but he has to devise a way of making outward appearances signify subjective states of in­nocence and happiness to which, in the real world, they are not necessarily related.

If one compares versions of Eden by pagan writers with Christian versions, it is noticeable that the former are beauti­ful in a serious way and that the latter are for the most part comic, even grotesque; they reserve the serious for descriptions of New Jerusalem.

Suppose a writer wishes to show that every man loves himself, not because of this or that quality he possesses, hut simply because he is uniquely he, what can he do? One possible image is that of an exceptionally ugly man—prodigiously fat, let us say—who is nevertheless convinced that he is irre­sistible to the ladies.

Here the exceptional obesity is an indirect sign for the uniqueness of the subject, and the fantastic vanity—in real life, a man must be reasonably good-looking before he can become vain in this way—an indirect sign for the independ­ence of self-love from any quality of the self. But both signs remain indirect; the ugliest, the most average-looking and the most beautiful human beings all love themselves in the same way.

Suppose he wishes to portray a humble man. The writer can show someone engaging by his own choice—he is per­fectly free to refuse—in activities for which he has no talent whatsoever and at which, therefore, he is bound to fail and look ridiculous, and then show him as radiant with self- esteem in his failure as if he had triumphed. Here self- esteem in a situation which in real life would destroy it is an indirect sign for humility; but not a direct sign, for a success­ful man can be humble too.

Or again, suppose a writer wishes to portray an innocent man. No human being is innocent, but small children are not yet personally guilty. It is possible that they have some knowledge of good and evil, but it is certain they have no innate knowledge of what their parents and society call right and wrong, and apply alike to such diverse matters as toliet habits, social manners, stealing and cruelty.

Compared with a normal adult, a small child is lacking in a sense of honor and a sense of shame. One way, therefore, in which a writer can portray an innocent man is to show an adult behaving in a way which his society considers out- xageous without showing the slightest awareness of public opinion. A normal adult might wish to behave in the same way and even do so if he were certain that nobody else would get to hear of his behavior, but fear of social disap­proval will prevent him from behaving so in public. The lack of shame is an indirect sign of innocence but, once again, not a direct sign, because lunatics show the same lack of shame.

When the novel opens, Mr. Pickwick is middle-aged. In his farewell speech at the Adelphi, he says that nearly the whole of his previous life had been devoted to business and the pur­suit of wealth, but we can no more imagine what he did during those years than we can imagine what Don Quixote did before he went mad or what Falstaff was like as a young man. In our minds Mr. Pickwick is bom in middle age with inde­pendent means; his mental and physical powers are those of a middle-aged man, his experience of the world that of a newborn child. The society into which he is born is a com­mercial puritanical society in which wealth is honored, pov­erty despised, and any detected lapse from the strictest standards of propriety severely punished. In such a society, Mr. Pickwick's circumstances and nature make him a for­tunate individual. He is comfortably off and, aside from a tendency at times to overindulge in food and drink, without vices. Sex, for example, is no temptation to him. One cannot conceive of him either imagining himself romantically in love with a girl of the lower orders, like Don Quixote, or con­sorting with whores, like Falstaff. So far as his experience goes, this world is an Eden without evil or suffering.

His sitting-room was the first floor front, his bedroom the second floor front; and thus, whether he was sitting at his desk in his parlour or standing before the dressing- glass in his dormitory, he had an equal opportunity of contemplating human nature in all the numerous phases it exhibits, in that not more populous than pop­ular thoroughfare. His landlady, Mrs. Bardell—the relict and sole executrix of a deceased custom-house officer— was a comely woman of bustling manners and agree­able appearance, with a natural genius for cooking, improved by study and long practice, into an exquisite talent. There were no children, no servants, no fowls— cleanliness and quiet reigned throughout the house; and in it Mr. Pickwick's will was law.

His three young friends, Tupman, Snodgrass and Winkle, are equally innocent. Each has a ruling passion, Tupman for the fair sex, Snodgrass for poetry, and Winkle for sport, but their talents are not very formidable. We are not given any specimen of Snodgrass's poems, but we may presume that, at their best, they reach the poetic level of Mrs. Leo Hunter's "Ode to an Expiring Frog."

Say, with fiends in spare of boys With wild halloo and brutal noise Hunted thee from marshy joys With a dog, Expiring frog?

We are shown Winkle at a shoot and learn that the birds are in far less danger than the bystanders. Tupman's age and girth are hardly good qualifications for a Romeo or a Don Juan. Contact with the world cures them of their il­lusions without embittering them, Eros teaches the two young men that the favors of Apollo and Artemis are not what they desire—Snodgrass marries Emily and becomes a gentle­man farmer, Winkle marries Arabella Allen and goes into his father's business—and Tupman comes to acquiesce cheer­fully in the prospect of a celibate old age.

The results of Mr. Pickwick's scientific researches into the origin of the Hampstead Ponds and the nature of Titdebats were no more reliable, we may guess, than his archaeology but, as the book progresses, we discover that, if his ability at enquiry is less than he imagines, his capacity to learn is as great. What he learns is not what he set out to learn but is forced upon him by fate and by his decision to go to prison, but his curiosity about life is just as eager at the end of the book as it was at tbe beginning; wbat he has been taught is the difference between trivial and important truths.

From time to time, Dickens interrupts his narrative to let Mr. Pickwick read or listen to a tale. Some, like the Bagman's story, the story of the goblins who stole a sexton, the anecdote of the tenant and the gloomy ghost, are tall tales about the supernatural, but a surprising number are melodramas about cases of extreme suffering and evil: a broken-down clown beats his devoted wife and dies of D.T.'s; the son of a wicked father breaks his mother's heart, is transported, returns after seventeen years and is only saved from parricide by his father dying before he can strike him; a madman raves sadistically; a man is sent to prison for debt by his father-in-law, his wife and child die, he comes out of prison and devotes the rest of his life to revenge, first refusing to save his enemy's son from drowning and then reducing him to absolute want.

Stories of this kind are not tall; they may be melodramat­ically written, but everybody knows that similar things happen in real life. Dickens' primary reason for introducing them was, no doubt, that of any writer of a serial—to intro­duce a novel entertainment for his readers at a point when he feels they would welcome an interruption in the main narrative—but, intentionally or unintentionally, they con­tribute to our understanding of Mr. Pickwick.

Mr. Pickwick is almost as fond of hearing horror tales and curious anecdotes as Don Quixote is of reading Courtly Romances, but the Englishman's illusion about the relation­ship of literature to life is the opposite of the Spaniard's.

To Don Quixote, literature and life are identical; he be­lieves that, when his senses present him with facts which are incompatible with courtly romance, his senses must be de­ceiving him. To Mr. Pickwick, on the other hand, literature and life are separate universes; evil and suffering do not exist in the world he perceives with his senses, only in the world of entertaining fiction.

Don Quixote sets out to be a Knight Errant, to win glory and the hand of his beloved by overthrowing the wicked and unjust and rescuing the innocent and afflicted. When Mr.

Pickwick and his friends set out for Rochester, they have no such noble ambitions; they are simply looking for the novel and unexpected. Their reason for going to Bath or to Ipswich is that of the tourist—they have never been there.

Don Quixote expects to suffer hardship, wounds and weari­ness in the good cause, and is inclined to suspect the pleasant, particularly if feminine, as either an illusion or a temptation to make him false to his vocation. The Pickwick Club expects to have nothing but a good time, seeing pretty towns and countrysides, staying in well-stocked inns and making pleasant new acquaintances like the Wardles. However, the first new new acquaintance they make in their exploration of Eden is with the serpent, Jingle, of whose real nature they have not the slightest suspicion. When Jingle's elopement with Rachel Wardle opens his eyes, Mr. Pickwick turns into a part-time Knight Errant: he assumes that Jingle, the base adventurer, is a unique case and, whenever he comes across his tracks, he conceives it his duty not to rest until he has frustrated his fell designs, but his main purpose in travel is still to tour Eden. Rescuing unsuspecting females from ad­venturers has not become his vocation.

During his first pursuit of Jingle, Mr. Pickwick meets Sam Weller, decides to engage him as a personal servant, and in trying to inform Mrs. Bardell of his decision creates the misunderstanding which is to have such unfortunate conse­quences. Sam Weller is no innocent; he has known what it is like to be destitute and homeless, sleeping under the arches of Waterloo Bridge, and he does not expect this world to be just or its inhabitants noble. He accepts Mr. Pickwick's offer, not because he particularly likes him, but because the job promises to be a better one than that of the Boots at an inn.

I wonder whether I'm meant to be a footman, or a groom, or a gamekeeper or a seedsman? I look like a sort of compo of every one of 'em. Never mind; there's change of air, plenty to see, and litde to do; and all this suits my complaint uncommon.

But before the story ends, he is calling Mr. Pickwick an angel, and his devotion to his master has grown so great that he insists upon being sent to prison in order to look after him. For Sam Weller had, after all, his own kind of innocence: about the evil in the world he had learned as much as anybody, but his experience had never led him to suspect that a person so innocent of evil as Mr. Pickwick could in­habit it.

Mr. Pickwick has hardly engaged Sam Weller when the letter arrives from Dodson and Fogg, announcing that Mrs. Bardell is suing him for Breach of Promise, and his real education be­gins.

If, hitherto, he had ever thought about the Law at all, he had assumed that it was what the Law must always claim to be:

i) Just. Those acts which the Law prohibits and pun­ishes are always unjust; no just or innocent act is ever prohibited or punished.

2,) Efficient. There are no unjust acts or persons that the Law overlooks or allows to go unpunished. 3) Infallible. Those whom the Law finds guilty are always guilty; no innocent person is ever found guilty.

He has got to learn that none of these claims is fulfilled, and why, in this world, they cannot be fulfilled.

Even were the Law formally perfect, its administration cannot be, because it has to be administered, not by angels or machines, but by human individuals who, like all human beings, vary in intelligence, temperament and moral char­acter: some are clever, some stupid, some kind, some cruel, some scrupulous, some unscrupulous.

Moreover, lawyers are in the morally anomalous position of owing their livelihood and social status to the criminal, the unjust and the ignorant; if all men knew the Law and kept it, there would be no work for lawyers. Doctors also owe their livelihood to an evil, sickness, but at least sickness is a natural evil—men do not desire ill health—but crimes and civil wrongs are acts of human choice, so that the contradiction between the purpose of Law and the personal interest of lawyers is more glaring. And then the complexity of the Law and the nature of the legal process make those who practice law peculiarly

liable to a vice which one might call the vice of Imaginary In­nocence.

No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called Games.

A game is a closed world of action which has no relation to any other actions of those who play it; the players have no motive for playing the game except the pleasure it gives them, and the outcome of the game has no consequences beyond it­self. Stricdy speaking, a game in which the players are paid to play, or in which they play for money stakes, ceases to be a game, for money exists outside the closed world of the game. In practice, one may say that a game played for stakes remains a game so long as the sums of money won or lost are felt by the players to be, not real, but token payments, that is to say, what they win or lose has no sensible effect upon their lives after the game is over.

The closed world of the game is one of mock passions, not real ones. Many games are, formally, mock batdes, but if any one of the players should feel or display real hostility, he im­mediately ceases to be a player. Even in boxing and wresding matches, in which the claim to be called games at all is doubt­ful, the ritual of shaking hands at the beginning and end asserts that they are not fights between real enemies.

Within the closed world of the game the only human beings are the players; the other inhabitants are things, balls, bats, chessman, cards, etc.

Like the real world, the game world is a world of laws which the players must obey because obedience to them is a necessary condition for entering it. In the game world there is only one crime, cheating, and the penalty for this is exclusion; once a man is known to be a cheat, no other player will play with him.

In a game the pleasure of playing, of exercising skill, takes precedence over the pleasure of winning. If this were not so, if victory were the real goal, a skillful player would prefer to have an unskillful one as his opponent, but only those to whom, like cardsharpers, a game is not a game but a livelihood, prefer this. In the game world the pleasure of victory is the

pleasure of just winning. The game world, therefore, is an innocent world because the ethical judgment good-or-bad does not apply to it; a good game means a game at the conclusion of which all the players, whether winners or losers, can truth­fully say that they have enjoyed diemselves, a point which is made by the Little Man's speech after the cricket match be­tween Dingley Dell and Muggleton.

Sir, while we remember that Muggleton has given birth to a Dumkins and a Podder, let us never forget that Dingley Dell can boast of a Luffey and a Struggles. Every gentleman who hears me, is probably acquainted with the reply made by an individual who—to use an ordinary figure of speech—"hung out" in a tub, to the Emperor Alexander:—"If I were not Diogenes," said he, "I would be Alexander": I can well imagine these gentle­men to say. If I were not Dumkins, I would be Luffey; If I were not Podder, I would be Struggles.

The vice of Imaginary Innocence consists in regarding an action in the open world of reality as if it were an action in the closed world of the game.

If this world were the worst of all possible worlds, a world where everybody was obliged to do what he dislikes doing and prohibited from doing anything he enjoyed, this vice would be impossible. It is only possible because some people have the good fortune to enjoy doing something which society requires to be done; what, from the point of view of society, is their necessary labor, is, from their own, voluntary play. Men fall into this vice when, because of the pleasure which the exercise of their calling gives them, they forget that what is play for them may for others concern real needs and passions.

Before Mr. Pickwick has to suffer in person from this human failing, he has already witnessed a manifestation of it in the party politics of Eatonswill.

Party politics presupposes that it is possible for two people, equally rational and well-meaning, to hold different opinions about a policy and possible for a man to be convinced by argument that his opinion has been mistaken. It is also pre­supposes that, however widely their political opinions may differ, all voters are agreed that the goal of politics is the establishment of a just and smoothly running society. But in Eatonswill the pleasure of party rivalry and debate has be­come an end in itself to both parties, a closed game world, and the real goal of politics has been forgotten.

The Blues lost no opportunity of opposing the Buffs and the Buffs lost no opportunity of opposing the Blues ... If the Buffs proposed to new skylight the market place, the Blues got up public meeting and denounced the proceeding; if the Blues proposed the erection of an additional pump in the High Street, the Buffs rose as one man and stood aghast at the enormity. There were Blue shops and Buff shops, Blue Inns and Buff Inns; there was a Blue aisle and a Buff aisle in the very church itself.

On such a parochial scale politics as a game is relatively harm­less, though on a national scale it is vicious, but there can be no circumstances in which the practice of Law as a game is not vicious. People who are not lawyers never come into court for fun; they come, either because they have been arrested or be­cause they believe they have been wronged and see no other way of redress. Winning or losing their case is never a mock victory or defeat but always a real one; if they lose, they go to prison or suffer social disgrace or are made to pay money.

Righdy or wrongly, it is believed in our culture that, in most criminal and civil trials, the best means of arriving at the ethical judgment guilty-or-not-guilty is through a kind of aesthetic verbal combat between a prosecuting and a defend­ing counsel, to which the judge acts as a referee, and the verdict is given by a jury. To say that a lawyer is a good lawyer, therefore, is an aesthetic not an ethical description; a good lawyer is not one who causes justice to be done, but one who wins his cases, whether his client be innocent or guilty, in the right or in the wrong, and nothing will enhance his reputation for being a good lawyer so much as winning a case against apparently hopeless odds, a state of affairs which is more likely to arise if his client is really guilty than if he is really innocent. As men, Dodson and Fogg are scoundrels but, as lawyers, their decent colleague Mr. Perkins has to admit that they are very good.

Mrs. Bardell, supported by Mrs. Chappins, was led in and placed in a drooping state at the other end of the seat on which Mr. Pickwick sat . . . Mrs. Saunders then appeared, leading in Master Bardell. At sight of her child, Mrs. Bardell started: suddenly recollecting herself, she kissed him in a frantic manner; then relapsing into a state of hysterical imbecility the good lady requested to be informed where she was. In reply to this, Mrs. Chap- pins and Mrs. Saunders turned their heads away and wept, while Messrs Dodson and Fogg intreated the plain­tiff to compose herself . . . "Very good notion, that in­deed," whispered Perkins to Mr. Pickwick. "Capital fellows those Dodson and Fogg; excellent ideas of effect, my dear sir, excellent."