The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

Dodson and Fogg may be scoundrels but they are not wicked men; though they cause undeserved suffering in others, they have no malevolent intent—the suffering they cause gives them no pleasure. To them, their clients are the pieces with which they play the legal game, which they find as enjoyable as it is lucrative. So, too, when Sergeant Buzzfuzz expresses his detestation of Mr. Pickwick's character, or Mr. Sumpkins bullies the unfortunate witness Winkle, what their victims feel as real hostility is, in fact, the mock hostility of the player: had they been engaged for the Defense, their abuse would have been directed against Mrs. Bardell and Mrs. Chappins, and they will have completely forgotten about the whole case by the next morning. The Guild Hall which is a Purgatory to Mr. Pickwick is to them what Dingley Dell is to him, an Arcadia.

When he is found guilty, Mr. Pickwick takes a vow that he will never pay the damages. In so doing he takes his first step out of Eden into the real world, for to take a vow is to com­mit one's future, and Eden has no conception of the future for it exists in a timeless present. In Eden, a man always does what he likes to do at the moment, but a man who takes a vow commits himself to doing something in the future which, when the time comes, he may dislike doing. The consequence of Mr. Pickwick's vow is that he has to leave his Eden of clean linen and polished silver for a Limbo of dirty crockery and rusty broken toasting forks where, in the eyes of the Law, he is a guilty man, a lawbreaker among other lawbreakers.

The particular class of lawbreakers among whom Mr. Pick­wick finds himself in The Fleet are debtors. In selecting this class of offender rather than another for him to encounter, one of Dickens' reasons was, of course, that he considered the English laws of his day concerning debt to be monstrously unjust and sending his fictional hero there gave him an op­portunity for satirical exposure of a real social abuse. But in a world where money is the universal medium of exchange, the notion of debt has a deep symbolic resonance. Hence the clause in the Lord's Prayer as it appears in the Authorized Version of St. Matthew—"Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors"—and the parable of the forgiving and unforgiv­ing creditor.

To be in debt means to have taken more from someone than we have given whether the more refers to material or to spiritual goods. Since we are not autonomous beings who can create and sustain our lives by ourselves, every human being is in debt to God, to Nature, to parents and neighbors for his existence, and it is against this background of universal human debt that we view the special case of debt and credit between one individual and another. We are bom unequal; even if all social inequalities were abolished, there would remain the natural inequalities of talent and inherited tendencies, and circumstance outside our control will always affect both our need to receive and our capacity to give. A rich man, in what­ever sense he is rich, can give more than a poor man; a baby and a sick person need more from others than a healthy adult. Debt or credit cannot be measured in quantitative terms; a relation between two persons is just if both take no more than they need and give as much as they can, and unjust if either takes more or gives less than this.

In prison, Mr. Pickwick meets three kinds of debtors. There are those like Smangle who are rather thieves than debtors for they have borrowed money with the conscious intention of not paying it back. There are the childish who believe in magic; they intended to return what they borrowed when their luck changed, but had no rational reason to suppose that it would. And there are those like the cobbler who have fallen into debt through circumstances which they could neither foresee nor control.

An old gentleman that I worked for, down in the coun­try, and died well off, left five thousand pounds behind him, one of which he left to me, 'cause I'd married a humble relation of his. And being surrounded by a great number of nieces and nephews, as well always quarrel­ling and fighting among themselves for the property, he makes me his executor to divide the rest among 'em as the will provided, and I paid all the legacies. I'd hardly done it when one nevy brings an action to set the will aside. The case comes on, some months afterwards, afore a deaf old gentleman in a back room somewhere down by Paul's Churchyard . . . and arter four counsels had taken a day a piece to both him regularly, he takes a week or two to consider and then gives his judgment that the testator was not quite right in the head, and I must pay all the money back again, and all the costs. I appealed; the case comes on before three or four very sleepy gentle­men, who had heard it all before in the other court and they very dutifully confirmed the decision of the old gendeman below. After that we went into Chancery, where we are still. My lawyers have had all my thousand pounds long ago; and what between the estate as they call it and the costs, I'm here for ten thousand, and shall stop here till I die, mending shoes.

Yet, in the eyes of the Law, all three classes are equally guilty. This does not mean, however, that all debtors receive the same treatment.

The three chums informed Mr. Pickwick in a breath that money was in the Fleet, just what money was out of it; that it would instantly procure him almost anything he desired; and that, supposing he had it, and had no objection to spend it, if he only signified his wish to have a room to himself, he might take possession of one, fur­nished and fitted to boot, in half an hour's time.

The lot of the penniless debtor, like the Chancery Prisoner, was, in Dickens' time, atrocious, far worse than that of the convicted criminal, for the convict was fed gratis by the State but the debtor was not, so that, if penniless, he must subsist on the charity of his fellow prisoners or die of starvation. On the other hand, for those with a little money and no sense of shame, the Fleet Prison could seem a kind of Eden.

There were many classes of people here, from the labor­ing man in his fustian jacket, to the broken down spend­thrift in his shawl dressing-gown, most appropriately out at elbows; but there was the same air about them all—a listless jail-bird careless swagger, a vagabondish who's afraid sort of bearing which is indescribable in words . . . "It strikes me, Sam," said Mr. Pickwick, "that imprison­ment for debt is scarcely any punishment at all." "Think not, sir?," inquired Mr. Weller. "You see how these fellows drink and smoke and roar," replied Mr. Pickwick, It's quite impossible that they can mind it much." "Ah, that's just the very thing sir," rejoined Sam, "they don't mind it; it's a regular holiday to them—all porter and skitdes. It is t'other wuns as gets down over, with this sort of thing: them down-hearted fellers as can't swig away at the beer, nor play at skitdes neither: them as would pay as they could, and get's low by being boxed up. I'll tell you wot it is, sir; them as is always a idlin' in public houses it don't damage at all, and them as is always a working wen they can, it damages too much."

His encounter with the world of the Fleet is the end of Mr. Pickwick's innocence. When he started out on his adventures, he believed the world to be inhabited only by the well-mean­ing, the honest and the entertaining; presenuy he discovered that it also contains malevolent, dishonest and boring inhabit­ants, but it is only after entering the Fleet that he realizes it contains persons who suffer, and that the division between those who are suffering and those who are not is more signifi­cant than the division between the just and the unjust, the innocent and the guilty. He himself, for instance, has been unjusdy convicted, but he is in prison by his own choice and, though he does not enjoy the Fleet as much as Dingley Dell, by the standards of comfort within the Fleet, he enjoys the advantages of a king, not because he is morally innocent while Jingle and Trotter are morally guilty, but because he happens to be the richest inmate while they are among the poorest. Then Mrs. Bardell, who through stupidity rather than malice is responsible for the injustice done to him, becomes a fellow prisoner. Mr. Pickwick is compelled to realize that he, too, is a debtor, because he has been more fortunate than most people, and that he must discharge his debt by forgiving his enemies and relieving their suffering. In order to do his duty, he has to do in fact what he had been falsely accused of doing, commit a breach of promise by breaking his vow and putting money into the pockets of Dodson and Fogg; for the sake of charity, he has to sacrifice his honor.

His loss of innocence through becoming conscious of the real world has the same consequences for Mr. Pickwick as a fictional character as recovering his sanity has for Don Quixote; in becoming ethically serious, both cease to be aesthetically comic, that is to say, interesting to the reader, and they must pass away, Don Quixote by dying, Mr. Pickwick by retiring from view.

Both novels are based upon the presupposition that there is a difference between the Law and Grace, the Righteous man and the Holy man: this can only be expressed indirectly by a comic contradiction in which the innocent hero comes into collision without appearing, in his own eyes, to suffer. The only way in which their authors can compel the reader to inter­pret this correcdy—neither to ignore the sign nor to take it as a direct sign—is, in the end, to take off the comic mask and say: "The Game, the make-believe is over: players and spec­tators alike must now return to reality. What you have heard was but a tall story."

POSTSCRIPT: THE FRIVOLOUS & THE EARNEST

An aesthetic religion (polytheism) draws no distinction be­tween what is frivolous and what is serious because, for it, all existence is, in the last analysis, meaningless. The whims of the gods and, behind them, the whim of the Fates, are the ultimate arbiters of all that happens. It is immediately frivolous because it is ultimately in despair.

A frivolity which is innocent, because unaware that anything serious exists, can be charming, and a frivolity which, precisely because it is aware of what is serious, refuses to take seriously that which is not serious, can be profound. What is so distaste­ful about the Homeric gods is that they are well aware of human suffering but refuse to take it seriously. They take the lives of men as frivolously as their own; they meddle with the former for fun, and then get bored.

When Zeus had brought the Trojans and Hector close to the ships, he left them beside the ships to bear the toil and woe unceasingly, and he himself turned his shining eyes away, gazing afar at the land of the horse-rearing Thracians and the Mysians, who fight in close array, and the noble Hippomolgoi who live on milk, and the Abioi, most righteous of men.

(Iliad, Book XIII.)

They hill us for their sport. If so, no human sportsman would receive one of the gods in his house: they shoot men sitting and out of season.

If Homer had tried reading the Iliad to the gods on Olympus, they would either have started to fidget and presently asked if he hadn't got something a little lighter, or, taking it as a comic poem, would have roared with laughter or possibly, even, reacting like ourselves to a tear-jerking movie, have poured pleasing tears.

The songs of Apollo: the lucky improvisations of an amateur.

The only Greek god who does any work is Hephaestus, and he is a lame cuckold.

Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's. Christianity draws a distinction be­tween what is frivolous and what is serious, but allows the former its place. What it condemns is not frivolity but idolatry, that is to say, taking the frivolous seriously.

The past is not to be taken seriously (Let the dead bury their deadj nor the future (Take no thought for the morrowonly the present instant and that, not for its aesthetic emotional content but for its historic decisiveness. (Now is the appointed time

Man desires to be free and he desires to feel important. This places him in a dilemma, for the more he emancipates himself from necessity the less important he feels.

That is why so many actes gratuites are criminal: a man asserts his freedom by disobeying a law and retains a sense of self-importance because the law he has disobeyed is an impor­tant one. Much crime is magic, an attempt to make free with necessity.

An alternative to criminal magic is the innocent game. Games are actes gratuites in which the players obey rules chosen by themselves. Games are freer than crimes because the rules of a game are arbitrary and moral laws are not; but they are less important.

The rules of a game give it importance to those who play it by making it difficult, a test of skill. This means, however, that a game can only be important to those who have the particular physical or mental skills which are required to play it, and the gift of such skills is a matter of chance.

To the degree that a vocation or a profession requires some gift, it partakes, for him who is able to practice it, of the nature of a game, however serious the social need it serves. The famous brain surgeon, Dr. Cushing, was once consulted by a student as to whether or not he should specialize in surgery: the doctor settled the question for him in the negative by ask­ing; "Do you enjoy the sensation of putting a knife into living flesh?"

To witness an immoral act, like a man beating his wife, makes a spectator angry or unhappy. To witness an untalented act, like a clumsy man wrestling with a window blind or a piece of bad sculpture, makes him laugh.

Life is not a game because one cannot say: "I will live on con­dition that I have a talent for living." Those who cannot play a game can always be spectators, but no one can hire somebody else to live his life for him while he looks on.

In a game, just losing is almost as satisfying as just winning. But no man ever said with satisfaction, "I almost married the girl I love," or a nation, "We almost won the war." In life the loser's score is always zero.

Nothing can be essentially serious for man except that which is given to all men alike, and that which is commanded of all men alike.

All men alike are given a physical body with physical needs which have to be satisfied if they are to survive, and all men alike are given a will which has the power to make choices. (To say of someone that his will is strong or weak is not like saying that he is tall or short, or even that he is clever or stupid: it is a description of how his will functions, not an assessment of the amount of will power he possesses.)

Corresponding to these gifts are two commands: "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread," and "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God and thy neighbor as thyself," are both commanded of all men alike.

Thus the only two occupations which are intrinsically serious are the two which do not call for any particular natural gifts, namely, unskilled manual labor and the priesthood (in its ideal aspects as the Apostolate). Any unskilled laborer and any priest is interchangeable with every other. Any old porter can carry my bag, any trumpery priest absolve me of a mortal sin. One cannot say of an unskilled laborer or of a priest that one is better or worse than another; one can only say, in the case of the laborer, that he is employed, in the case of the priest, that he has been ordained.

Of all other occupations, one must say that, in themselves, they are frivolous. They are only serious in so far that they are the means by which those who practice them earn their bread and are not parasites on the labor of others, and to the degree that they permit or encourage the love of God and neighbor.

There is a game called Cops and Robbers, but none called Saints and Sinners.

It is incorrect to say, as the Preamble to the American Con­stitution says, that all men have a right to the pursuit of happi­ness. All men have a right to avoid unncessary pain if they can, and no man has a right to pleasure at the cost of another's pain. But happiness is not a right; it is a duty. To the degree that we are unhappy, we are in sin. (And vice versa.) A duty cannot be pursued because its imperative applies to the present instant, not to some future date.

My duty towards God is to be happy; my duty towards my neighbor is to try my best to give him pleasure and alleviate his pain. No human being can make another one happy.

*

GENIUS & APOSTLE

No genius has an in order that: the Apostle has absolutely and paradoxically an in order that.

s0ren kierkegaard

I

In such theoretical discussions concerning the nature of drama as I have read, it has always seemed to me that insuf­ficient attention was paid to the nature of the actor. What distinguishes a drama from both a game and a rite is that, in a game, the players play themselves and, in a rite, though the participants may represent somebody else, a god, for instance, they do not have to imitate him, any more than an ambassador to a foreign country has to imitate the sovereign whom he represents. Further, in both a game and a rite, the actions are real actions, or at least, real to the participants—goals are scored, the bull is killed, the bread and wine are transubstan­tiated—but, in a drama, all actions are mock actions—the

actor who plays Banquo is not really murdered, the singer who plays Don Giovanni may himself be a henpecked hus­band.

No other human activity seems as completely gratuitous as "acting"; games are gratuitous acts, but it can be argued that they have a utile value—they develop the muscles or sharpen the wits of those who play them—but what con­ceivable purpose could one human being have for imitating another?

The fact that dramatic action is mock action and mimetic art completely gratuitous makes the dramatic picture of human life a peculiar one. In real life, we exist as bodies, social indi­viduals and unique persons simultaneously, so that there can be no human deed or act of personal choice which is without an element of human behavior, what we do from necessity, either the necessities of our physical nature or the habits of our socially acquired "second nature." But on the stage, the kind of human life we see is a life of pure deeds from which- every trace of behavior has been eliminated. Consequently, any human activity which cannot be imagined without its element of necessity, cannot be represented on the stage. Actors, for example, can toy with cucumber sandwiches, but they cannot eat a hearty meal because a hearty meal cannot be imagined taking less than three quarters of an hour to consume. Dramatists have been known to expect an actor to write a letter on stage, but it always looks ridiculous; on stage a letter can be read aloud but not written in silence. Nor can an actor do any serious piece of work, for real work cannot be imagined apart from the real time it takes. Only deeds can be divorced from real time. Thus, a man might write in his diary, "I began or I finished work at 9:15," but he would never write "I worked at 9:15"; (as a court witness he might say, "I was working at 9:15"); on the other hand, he might very well write, "At 9:15 I proposed to Julia and she accepted me" be­cause, although his words of proposal and hers of acceptance must have taken a certain length of time to utter, this is irrele­vant to the dramatic significance of the event.

Since human life, as the stage can present it, is, firstly, a life of pure action and, secondly, a public life—the actors play to an audience, not to themselves—the characters best-suited to drama are men and women who by fate or choice lead a public existence and whose deeds are of public concern. Worldly ambition, for example, is a more dramatic motive than sexual passion, because worldly ambition can only be realized in public, while sexual passion unless, like that of Antony and Cleopatra, it has political consequences, affects only a handful of persons. Unfortunately for the modern dramatist, during the past century and a half the public realm has been less and less of a realm where human deeds are done, and more and more a realm of mere human behavior. The contemporary dramatist has lost his natural subject.

This process was already far advanced in the nineteenth century and dramatists, like Ibsen, who took their art seriously, were beginning to look for new kinds of heroes. The romantic movement had brought to public notice a new kind of hero, the artist-genius. The public interest taken in figures like Victor Hugo, Dickens and Wagner would have been unthink­able two centuries earlier.

It was inevitable that, sooner or later, a dramatist would ask himself if the artist-genius could be substituted for the traditional man-of-action as a dramatic hero. A sensible dramatist, however, would immediately realize that a direct treatment would be bound to fail. An artist is not a doer of deeds but a maker of things, a worker, and work cannot be represented on stage because it ceases to be work if the time it takes is foreshortened, so that what makes an artist of interest, his art—aside from which he is not an artist but simply a man—will have to take place off stage. Secondly, the audience will have to be convinced that the figure they are told is a genius really is one, not somebody without any talent who says he is a genius. If he is a poet, for example, the poetry of his which the audience hear must be of the first order. But, even if the dramatist is himself a great poet, the only kind of poetry he can write is his own; he cannot make up a special kind of poetry for his hero, unlike his own yet equally great. Lastly, while deeds and character are identical, works and character are not; the relation between who an art­ist is as a person and what he makes is too vague to discuss. To say that Lesbia's treatment of Catullus and his love for her were the cause of his poetry is a very different thing from saying that Macbeth's ambition and the prophecies of the witches were the cause of Banquo's murder. Had both their characters been different, the poems would, no doubt, have been different, but their characters do not explain why Catullus wrote the actual poems he did, and not an infinite number of others which he might equally well have written but did not.

In order to become an artist, a man must be endowed with an exceptional talent for fabrication or expression, but what makes it possible for him to exercise this talent and for his public to appreciate it is the capacity of all human beings to imagine anything which is the case as being otherwise; every man, for example, can imagine committing a murder or laying down his life for a friend's without actually doing so. Is there, one can picture Ibsen asking himself, perhaps subconsciously, any figure traditionally associated with the stage who could be made to stand for this imaginative faculty? Yes, there is: the actor. Keats' famous description of the poet applies even more accurately to the actor.

As to the poetic character itself, it is not itself: it has no self—it is everything and nothing. The Sun, the Moon, the sea, and men and women who are creatures of im­pulse, are poetical and have about them an unchange­able attribute—the poet has none: no identity.

Throughout Peer Gynt, one question keeps being asked and answered in various ways, namely, Who am I? What is my real self? For the animals, the question does not arise.

What innocence is in the life of beasts.

They perform the behest of their great creator.

They are themselves.

The nearest human approximation to this animal selfhood is the "second nature" a man acquires through heredity and social custom.

My father thieves, His son must steal. My father received, And so must 1. We must bear our lot, And be ourselves.

So, too, with the drowning cook who gets as far in the Lord's Prayer as Give us this day our daily hread and then sinks.

Amen, lad. You were yourself to the end.

Next comes the social "idiot" in the Greek sense, the indi­vidual whose life is as conditioned by one personal overriding interest as the conventional individual's is by social habit. In the first act Peer sees a young peasant cutting off a finger in order to escape conscription; Peer is fascinated and shocked:

The thought perhaps—the wish to will, That I can understand, but really To do the deed. Ah me, that beats me.

In the last act he hears a funeral sermon about the same peasant in which the parson says:

He was a bad citizen, no doubt, For Church and State alike, a sterile tree— But up there on the rocky mountain side Where his work lay, there I say he was great Because he was himself.

Neither of these human ways of being oneself, however, sat­isfy Peer. He tells his mother he means to be a King and Emperor, but there is only one kind of empire which nobody else can threaten or conquer, the empire of one's own con­sciousness, or, as Peer defines it:

The Gyntian Self—An army that, Of wishes, appetites, desires! The Gyntian Self—It is a sea Of fancies, claims, and aspirations.

But the Peer we see on stage has no appetites or desires in the ordinary sense; he plays at having them. Ibsen solves the problem of presenting a poet dramatically by showing us a man who treats nearly everything he does as a role, whether it be dealing in slaves and idols or being an Eastern Prophet. A poet in real life would have written a drama about slave trading, then another drama about a prophet but, on the stage, play acting stands for making.

The kinship of the poet to the dreamer on the one hand and the madman on the other and his difference from them both is shown by Peer's experiences, first in the kingdom of the trolls and then in the asylum. The kingdom of dreams is ruled by wish or desire; the dreaming ego sees as being the case whatever the self desires to be the case. The ego, that is to say, is the helpless victim of the self; it cannot say, "I'm dreaming." In madness it is the self which is the help­less victim of the ego: a madman says, "I am Napoleon," and his self cannot tell him, "You're a liar." (One of the great difficulties in translating Peer Gynt is, I understand, that Norwegian has two words, one for the I which is conscious and another for the self of which it is conscious, where Eng­lish has only one. Myself can mean either.)

Both the dreamer and the madman are in earnest; neither is capable of play acting. The dreamer is like the moviegoer who writes abusive letters to the actor he has seen playing a villain; the madman is like the actor who believes the same thing about himself, namely, that he is identical with his role.

But the poet pretends for fun; he asserts his freedom by lying—that is to say, by creating worlds which he knows are imaginary. When die troll king offers to turn Peer into a real troll by a little eye operation, Peer indignandy refuses. He is perfecdy willing, he says, to swear that a cow is a beautiful maiden, but to be reduced to a condition in which he could not tell one from the other—that he will never submit to.

The difference between trolls and men, says the king, is that the Troll Motto is To Thyself Be Enough, while the Human Motto is To Thyself Be True. The Button-Moulder and the Lean One both have something to say about the latter.

To be oneself is: to slay oneself.

But on you that answer is doubdess lost;

And therefore we'll say: to stand forth everywhere

With Master's intention displayed like a sign-board.

Remember, in two ways a man can be

Himself—there's a right and wrong side to the jacket.

You know they have lately discovered in Paris

A way to take portraits by help of the sun.

One can either produce a straightforward picture,

Or else what is known as a negative one.

In the latter the lights and the shades are reversed.

But suppose there is such a thing as a poetic vocation or, in terms of Ibsen's play, a theatrical vocation; how do their words apply? If a man can be called to be an actor, then the only way he can be "true" to himself is by "acting," that is to say, pretending to be what he is not. The dreamer and the mad­man are "enough" to themselves because they are unaware that anything exists except their own desires and hallucina­tions; the poet is "enough" to himself in the sense that, while knowing that others exist, as a poet he does without them. Outside Norway, Peer has no serious relations with others, male or female. On the subject of friendship, Ibsen once wrote to Georg Brandes:

Friends are a cosdy luxury, and when one invests one's capital in a mission in life, one cannot afford to have friends. The expensiveness of friendship does not lie in what one does for one's friends, but in what, out of re­gard for them, one leaves undone. This means the crush­ing of many an intellectual germ.

But every poet is also a human being, distinguishable from what he makes, and through Peer's relations to Ase and Sol- veig, Ibsen is trying to show us, I believe, what kind of person is likely to become a poet—assuming, of course, that he has the necessary talent. According to Ibsen, the predis­posing factors in childhood are, first, an isolation from the social group—owing to his father's drunkenness and spend­thrift habits, he is looked down on by the neighbors—and second, a playmate who stimulates and shares his imaginative life—a role played by his mother.

Ay, you must know that my husband, he drank, Wasted and trampled our gear under foot. And meanwhile at home there sat Peerkin and I— The best we could do was to try to forget. . . . Some take to brandy, and others to lies; And we—why, we took to fairy-tales.

It is not too fanciful, I believe, to think of laboring as a neuter activity, doing as masculine, and making as feminine. All fabrication is an imitation of motherhood and, whenever we have information about the childhood of an artist, it reveals a closer bond with his mother than with his father: in a poet's development, the phrase The milk of the Word is not a mere figure of speech.

In their games together, it is the son who takes the initia­tive and the mother who seems the younger, adoring child. Ase dies and bequeaths to Solveig, the young virgin, the role of being Peer's Muse. If the play were a straight realistic drama, Peer's treatment of Solveig would bear the obvious psychoanalytic explanation—namely, that he suffers from a mother-fixation which forbids any serious sexual relation: he cannot love any women with whom he sleeps. But the play is a parable and, parabolically, the mother-child relationship has, I believe, another significance: it stands for the kind of love that is unaffected by time and remains unchanged by any act of the partners. Many poets, it would seem, do their best work when they are "in love," but the psychological condi­tion of being "in love" is incompatible with a sustained his­torical relationship like marriage. The poet's Muse must either be dead like Dante's Beatrice, or far away like Peer's Solveig, or keep on being reincarnated in one lady after another. Ase's devotion gives Peer his initial courage to be a poet and live without an identity of his own, Solveig gives him the courage to continue to the end. When at the end of the play he asks her, "Where is the real Peer?"—the human being as distinct from his poetic function—she answers, "In my faith, in my hope, in my love." This is an echo of his own belief. Ibsen leaves in doubt the question whether this faith is justified or not. It may be that, after all, the poet must pay for his voca­tion by ending in the casting-ladle. But Peer has so far been lucky: "He had women behind him."

The insoluble difficulty about the artist as a dramatic char­acter is that, since his relations with others are either momen­tary or timeless, he makes any coherent plot impossible. Peer Gynt is a fascinating play, but one cannot say its structure is satisfying. Practically the whole of the drama (and nearly all of the best scenes) is a Prologue and an Epilogue: the Prologue shows us how a boy comes to be destined for the vocation of poet rather than a career as a statesman or an engineer, the Epilogue shows us the moral and psychological crisis for a poet in old age when death faces him and he must account for his life. Only in the Fourth Act are we shown, so to speak, the adult poet at work, and in this act the number of scenes and the number of characters intro­duced are purely arbitrary. Ibsen uses the act as an oppor­tunity to make satirical comments on various aspects of Norwegian life, but Peer himself is only accidentally related to the satire.

il

Two years before Peer Gynt, Ibsen wrote Brand. Both were composed in Italy, and Ibsen said of them:

May I not like Christoff in Jacob von Tyboe, point to Brand and Peer Gynt and say—See, the wine cup has done this.

The heroes of these two plays are related to each other by being each other's opposite. To Peer the Devil is a dangerous viper who tempts man to do the irretrievable; to Brand the Devil is Compromise.

Brand is a priest. Ibsen once said that he might equally well have made him a sculptor or a politician, but this is not true. In Rome Ibsen had met and been deeply impressed by a young Norwegian theological student and Kierkegaard en­thusiast, Christopher Brunn. At the time Ibsen was very angry with his fellow countrymen for having refused to come to the aid of Denmark when Germany attacked her and annexed Schleswig-Holstein. Brunn had actually fought as a volunteer in the Danish army and he asked Ibsen why, if he had felt as strongly as he professed, he had not done like­wise. Ibsen made the answer one would expect—a poet has other tasks to perform—but it is clear that the question made him very uncomfortable and Brand was a product of his dis­comfort.

Whether he had read it for himself or heard of it from Brunn, it seems evident that Ibsen must have been aware of Kierkegaard's essay on the difference between a genius and an apostle. In Peer Gynt he deals with the first; in Brand, which he wrote first, with the second.

An apostle is a human individual who is called by God to deliver a message to mankind. Oracles and shamans are divine mouthpieces, but they are not apostles. An oracle or a shaman is an accredited public official whose spiritual authority is recognized by all; he does not have to seek out others but sits .and waits for them to consult him—Delphi is the navel of the world. He receives a professional training and, in order to qualify, he must exhibit certain talents, such as an ability to enter into a trance state.

An apostle, on the other hand, is called to preach to others a divine message which is new to them, so that he cannot •expect others to come looking for him nor expect to have any official spiritual status. While oracle and shaman are, so to speak, radio sets through which at certain moments a god may speak, an apostle is an ordinary human messenger like a man who delivers mail; he cannot wait for certain divinely inspired moments to deliver his message and, if his audience should ask him to show his credentials, he has none.

In the case of any vocation of Genius, a man is called to it by a natural gift with which he is already endowed. A young man, for example, who tells his parents, "I am going to be a sculptor, cost what it may," bases his statement on the conviction that he has been born with a talent for making beautiful, three-dimensional objects. It makes no difference to his decision whether he is a Christian who believes that this talent is a gift of God or an atheist who attributes it to blind Nature or Chance for, even if he is a believer, he knows that he is called by his gift, not by God direcdy. Since the gift is his, to say "I must become a sculptor" and "I want to become one" means the same thing: it is impossible to imag­ine anyone's saying, "A sculptor is the last thing on earth I want to be, but I feel it is my duty to become one."

An Apostle, on the other hand, is called by God direcdy. Jehovah says to Abraham: "Go get thee up out of the land"; Christ says to Matthew, the tax-collector; "Follow me!" If one asks, "Why Abraham or Matthew and not two other people?" there is no human answer; one cannot speak of a talent for being an Aposde or of the apostolic temperament. Whatever ultimate spiritual rewards there may be for an Aposde, they are unknowable and unimaginable; all he knows is that he is called upon to forsake everything he has been, to venture into an unknown and probably unpleasant future. Hence it is impossible to imagine the apostolic call­ing's being echoed by a man's natural desire. Any genuine Aposde must, surely, say, "I would not but, alas, I must." The prospective sculptor can correcdy be said to will to become a sculptor—that is to say, to submit himself to the study, toil and discipline which becoming a sculptor involves—but an Aposde cannot correcdy be said to will anything; he can only say, "Not as I will, but as Thou wilt." It is possible for a man to be deceived about a secular calling—he imagines he has a talent when in fact he has none—but there is an objective test to prove whether his calling is genuine or imag­inary: either he produces valuable works or he does not. A great sculptor may die with his works totally unrecognized by the public but, in the long run, the test of his greatness is worldly recognition of his work. But in the case of an Aposde there is no such objective test: he may make a million converts or he may make none, and we are still no nearer knowing whether his vocation was genuine or not. He may give his body to be burned and still we do not know. What makes an apostle a hero in a religious sense is not what he does or fails to do for others, but the constancy of his faith that God has called him to speak in His name.

The message Brand has to deliver is drawn for the most part from Kierkegaard and may be summed up in two passages from Kierkegaard's Journals.

The Christianity of the majority consists roughly of what may be called the two most doubtful extremities of Christianity Cor, as the parson says, the two things which must be clung to in life and death), first of all the saying about the little child, that one becomes a Christian as a little child and that of such is the King­dom of Heaven; the second is the thief on the cross. People live by virtue of the former—in death they reckon upon consoling themselves with the example of the thief.

This is the sum of their Christianity; and, correctly defined, it is a mixture of childishness and crime. . . .

Most people think that the Christian commandments, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself, etc." are in­tentionally oversevere, like putting one's clock ahead to make sure of getting up in the morning.

In some of Brand's speeches, however, there is an emphasis on the human will which is Nietzschean rather than Kierke-

A whole shall rise which God shall recognize, Man, His greatest creation, His close heir, Adam, young and strong.

It is not

Martyrdom to die in agony upon a cross But to will that you shall die upon a cross.

These are not statements which Kierkegaard would have made. Indeed, he expressly says that there is a great difference between willing a martyrdom which God has willed for you and willing one for yourself before you know whether or not it is required of you, and that to will the second is spiritual pride of an extreme kind.

Brand's prophetic denunciations are directed against three kinds of life, the aesthetic life governed by the mood of the moment, the conventional life of social and religious habit, and the insane life of "The wild of heart in whose broken mind evil seems beautiful," which, presumably, refers to the criminal as well as to the clinically insane.

Ibsen did not, as Shaw might have done, make his play an intellectual debate. Brand has no trouble in demolishing the arguments of his opponents. There is a great deal more to be said for the aesthetic life than a ninny like Ejnar can put forward, and a belief in the value of habit, both in social and religious life, can and is held by wise good people; it is not confined to cowardly crooks like the Mayor and the Provost. The only antagonist who is in any way his equal is the doctor.

doctor: I've got to visit a patient.

brand: My mother?

doctor: Yes . . . You've been to see her already per­haps?

brand: No.

doctor: You're a hard man. I've struggled all the

way.

Across the moor, through mist and sleet, Although I know she pays like a pauper.

brand: May God bless your energy and skill.

Ease her suffering, if you can. . . . doctor: Don't wait for ber to send for you.

Come now, with me. brand: Until she sends for me, I know no duty there. doctor: . . . your credit account

For strength of will is full, but, priest, Your love account is a white virgin page,

Brand replies with an outburst against the popular use of the word love as a veil to cover and excuse weakness, but this does not refute the doctor because the latter, by risking his life to ease the suffering of a dying woman, has proved that he means something quite different by the word. There is, how­ever, no dialectical relation between his position and Brand's because his ethics are those of his profession. Brand has just refused to go and give his dying mother the sacrament be­cause she will not renounce her property. To the Doctor this seems gratuitous cruelty because he can only think about the care of sick souls in terms of the cure of sick bodies. In his world of experience a patient is either in pain or not in pain, and every patient desires to be well. He cannot grasp, because it is outside his professional experience, that, in the soul, a desire may be the sickness itself. Brand's mother clings to her possessions with passionate desire, and to relinquish them will cause her great suffering but, unless she suffers, she can never know true joy. (The analogy to surgery does not hold. The patient must suffer now at die hands of the surgeon in order that he may be free from pain in the future, but he already knows what it means to be free from pain. The sinner does not know what it means to be spiritually happy; he only knows that to give up his sin will be a great suffering.)

In the character of Brand Ibsen shows us an individual of heroic courage who exemplifies in his own life what he preaches and who suffers and dies for what he believes, but, as a religious hero, he won't quite do. Our final impression is of a tragic hero of the conventional kind whose field of action happens to be religion, but his motives are the same pride and self-will that motivate the tragic heroes of this world.

If, as an apostle, Brand fails to convince us, the fault, I helieve, is not due to lack of talent on Ibsen's part, but to his mistaken approach. While, when he came to write Peer Gynt, he approached the dramatic portrayal of a genius in­directly, in tackling the portrayal of an aposde, he tried a direct approach and this was bound to fail.

Thus, he gives us a picture of Brand's childhood. Unlike Peer, poor Brand did not have women behind him, and in the end he has to drag Agnes after him. His mother had re­nounced marriage to the man she loved in order to marry one who was expected to make money. He failed and died, and she had denied all love and happiness both to herself and her son and devoted herself with absolute passion to the acquisition and hoarding of wealth. The relation between mother and son is one of defiant hostility mingled with re­spect for the other's strength of will and contempt for senti­mentality masquerading as love. In preferring damnation to the surrender of all her goods, she shows herself every bit as much a believer in All-or-Nothing as Brand does in refusing to give her the Sacrament unless she renounces her idol. Psy­chologically, mother and son are alike; the only difference be­tween them is in the God whom each worships.

Such a situation is dramatically interesting and psycho­logically plausible, but it inevitably makes us suspect Brand's claim to have been called by the True God, since we perceive a personal or hereditary motivation in his thought and con­duct. Peer's relation to his mother is a possible psychological background for a certain class of human being, the class of artist-geniuses. But every aposde is a member of a class of one and no psychological background can throw any light on a calling which is initiated by God direcdy.

It is very difficult to conceive of a successful drama with­out important personal relations, and of such, the most in­tense is, naturally, the relation between a man and a woman. The scenes between Brand and Agnes are the most exciting and moving parts of the poem, but their effect is to turn

Brand into a self-torturing monster for whose sufferings we can feel pity but no sympathy. Whether one agrees or dis­agrees with the insistence of the Roman Church that its priests be celibate—The Church Visible, after all, requires administrators, theologians, diplomats, etc., as well as apostles —the apostolic calling, ideally considered, is incompatible with marriage. An apostle exists for the sake of others but not as a person, only as a mouthpiece and a witness to the Truth; once they have received the Truth and he has borne his wit­ness, his existence is of no account to others. But a husband and wife are bound by a personal tie, and the demands they make upon each other are based on this. If a husband asks his wife to make this or that sacrifice, he asks her to make it for his sake, and his right to ask comes from their mutual personal love. But when an apostle demands that another make a sacrifice, it cannot be for his sake; he cannot say, "If you love me, please do this," but can only say, "Thus saith the Lord. Your salvation depends upon your doing this."

When Brand first meets Agnes, he is already convinced of his calling and aware that suffering, certainly, and a martyr's death, possibly, will be required of him. His words and his risking of his life to bring consolation to a dying man reveal to her the falseness of her relation to Ejnar. At this point I do not think she is in love with Brand, but she is overwhelmed with admiration for him as a witness to the truth and prepared to fall in love with him if he should show any personal in­terest in her. He does show a personal interest—he is lonely and longing for personal love—they marry, they are mutually happy and they have a son, Ulf. Then comes disaster. Either they must leave the fjord and his work as the village priest— an act which Brand believes would be a betrayal of his calling —or their child must die. Brand decides that they shall re­main, and Ulf does die. One would have thought that the obvious solution was to send his wife and child away to a sunnier climate and remain himself (since h_e inherited his mother's money, he has the means) but this solution does not seem to have occurred to him. (Of course if it had, the big dramatic scenes which follow could not have been written.)

Later, he accuses Agnes of idolatry in not accepting Ulf's death as the will of God and makes her give away all his clothes to a gypsy child. Possibly she is guilty of idolatry and should give the clothes away for the sake of her own soul and, were Brand a stranger, he could tell her so. But he is both the husband whom she loves and the father of her child who took the decision which caused the child's death and so led her into the temptation of idolatry, so that when he tells her:

You are my wife, and I have the right to demand That you shall devote yourself wholly to our calling

the audience feels that he has no such right. This is only the most obvious manifestation of a problem which besets Ibsen throughout the play, namely, the problem of how to make an apostle dramatically interesting. To be dramatically viable, a character must not only act, but also talk about his actions and his feelings and talk a great deal: he must address others as a person—a messenger cannot be a major character on the stage. For dramatic reasons, therefore, Ibsen has to allow Brand to speak in the first person and appear the author of his acts, to say "I will this." But an apostle is a messenger, and he acts not by willing but by submitting to the will of God who cannot appear on the stage. It is inevitable, therefore, that our final impression of Brand is of an idolator who wor­ships not God, but his God. It makes no difference if the God he calls his happens to be the true God; so long as he thinks of Him as his, he is as much an idolator as the savage who bows down to a fetish. To me, one of the most fascinating scenes of the play is Brand's final encounter with Ejnar. Ejnar has had some sort of evangelical conversion, believes that he is saved, and is going off to be a missionary in Africa. Brand tells him of Agnes' death, but he shows no sorrow, though he had once loved her.

ejnar: How was her faith? brand: Unshakeable. ejnar: In whom? brand: In her God.

ejnar: Her God cannot save her. She is damned. . . . brand: You dare to pronounce judgment on her and me,

Poor, sinning fool? ejnar: My faith has washed me clean. brand: Hold your tongue. ejnar : Hold yours.

Ejnar, is, as it were, a caricature of Brand, but the likeness is cruel.

Though a direct portrayal of an aposde is not possible in art, there exists, though not in drama, one great example of a successful indirect portrayal, Cervantes' Don Quixote.

ill

The Knight-Errant

The Knight-Errant, whom Don Quixote wishes to become and actually parodies, was an attempt to Christianize the pagan epic hero.

O He possesses epic arete of good birth, good looks, strength, etc.

2,) This arete is put in the service of the Law, to rescue the unfortunate, protect the innocent, and combat the wicked.

His motives are three: a) the desire for glory

the love of justice

the love of an individual woman who judges and rewards.

He suffers exceptionally; first, in his adventures and collisions with the lawless; secondly, in his tempta­tions to lawlessness in the form of unchastity; and thirdly, in his exceptionally difficult erotic romance.

In the end he succeeds in this world. Vice is punished and virtue is rewarded by the lady of his heart.

When we first meet Don Quixote he is a) poor, b) not a knight, c) fifty, d) has nothing to do except hunt and read romances about Knight-Errantry. Manifestly, he is the op­posite of the heroes he admires, i.e., he is lacking in the epic arete of birth, looks, strength, etc. His situation, in fact, is aesthetically uninteresting except for one thing: his passion is great enough to make him sell land to buy books. This makes him aesthetically comic. Religiously he is tragic, for he is a hearer not a doer of the word, the weak man guilty in his imagination of Promethean pride. Now suddenly he goes mad, i.e., he sets out to become what he admires. Aesthetically this looks like pride; in fact, religiously, it is a conversion, an act of faith, a taking up of his cross.

The Quixotic Madness and the Tragic Madness

The worldly villain like Macbeth is tempted by an arete he possesses to conquer this world of the nature of which he has a shrewd idea. His decisions are the result of a calculation of the probabilities of success, each success increases his madness but in the end he fails and is brought to despair and death. (Don Quixote is a) lacking in arete, b) has a fantastic con­ception of this world, c) always meets with failure yet is never discouraged, d) suffers himself intentionally and makes others suffer only unintentionally.

The Quixotic Madness and the Comic Madness

The comic rogue declares: the world=that which exists to give me money, beauty, etc. I refuse to suffer by being thwarted. He is cured by being forced to suffer through colli­sion with the real world.

Don Quixote declares: The world = that which needs my existence to save it at whatever cost to myself. He comes into collision with the real world but insists upon continuing to suffer. He becomes the Knight of the Doleful Countenance but never despairs.

Don Quixote and Hamlet

Hamlet lacks faith in God and in himself. Consequendy he must define his existence in terms of others, e.g., I am the man whose mother married his uncle who murdered his father. He would like to become what the Greek tragic hero is, a creature of situation. Hence his inability to act, for he can only "act," i.e., play at possibilities.

Don Quixote is the antithesis of an actor, being completely incapable of seeing himself in a role. Defining his situation in terms of his own character, he is completely unreflective.

Madness and Faith

To have faith in something or someone means

that the object of faith is not manifest. If it becomes manifest, then faith is no longer required.

the relation of faith between subject and object is unique in every case. Hundreds may believe, but each has to believe by himself.

Don Quixote exemplifies both, a) He never sees things that aren't there (delusion) but sees them differently, e.g., windmills as giants, sheep as armies, puppets as Moors, etc. b) He is the only individual who sees them thus.

Faith and Idolatry

The idolater makes things out to be stronger than they really are so that they shall be responsible for him, e.g., he might worship a windmill for its giandike strength. Don Quixote never expects things to look after him; on the con­trary he is always making himself responsible for things and people who have no need of him and regard him as an im­pertinent old meddler.

Faith and Despair

People are tempted to lose faith a) when it fails to bring worldly success, b) when the evidence of their senses and feelings seem against it. Don Quixote a) is consistently de­feated yet persists, b) between his fits of madness he sees that the windmills are not giants but windmills, etc., yet, instead of despairing, he says, "Those cursed magicians delude me, first drawing me into dangerous adventures by the appearance of things as they really are, and then presently changing the face of things as they please." His supreme test comes when Sancho Panza describes a country wench, whom Don Quixote sees correctly as such, as the beautiful Princess Dulcinea and in spite of his feelings concludes that he is enchanted and that Sancho Panza is right.

Don Quixote and the Knight-Errant

Don Quixote's friends attack the Romances he loves on the grounds that they are historically untrue, and lacking in style.

Don Quixote, on the other hand, without knowing it, by his very failure to imitate his heroes exactly, at once reveals that the Knight-Errant of the Romances is half-pagan, and be­comes himself the true Christian Knight.

Epic Dualism

The world of the Romances is a dualistic world where the completely good and innocent fight the completely evil and guilty. The Knight-Errant comes into collision only with those who are outside the Law: giants, heretics, heathens, etc. When he is in one of his spells, Don Quixote, under the illusion that he is showing the righteous anger of the Knight- Errant, comes into collision with the law, i.e., he attacks inno­cent clerics and destroys other people's property.

When he is not deluded as to the nature of those he is trying to help, e.g., the convicts or the boy being thrashed, he only succeeds in making things worse and earns enmity, not grati­tude.

F rauendienst

Don Quixote affirms all the articles of the Amor religion, namely, that a) the girl must be noble and beautiful, b) there must be some barrier, c) the final goal of the Knight's trials is to be rewarded by having his love reciprocated.

In fact, the girl he calls Dulcinea del Toboso is "a good likely country lass for whom he had formerly had a sort of inclination, though 'tis believed she never heard of it." She is of lower social status, and he is past the age when sexual love means anything to him. Nevertheless, his behavior has all the courage that might be inspired by a great passion.

Again, Don Quixote expects to be tempted to unchastity so that, in the inn when the hunchback maid is trying to reach the carter's bed, he fancies that she is the daughter of the

Governor oЈ the Castle, who has fallen in love with him and is trying to seduce him. Bruised and battered as he is, even Don Quixote has to admit that for the moment he has no capacity.

The language is the language of Eros, the romantic idoliza­tion of the fair woman, but its real meaning is the Christian agape which loves all equally irrespective of their merit.

Snobbery

The true Knight-Errant has nothing to do with the Lower Orders and must never put himself in an undignified position, e.g., Launcelot is disgraced by riding in a cart. Don Quixote attempts to do likewise but with singular unsuccess. He is constantly having to do with the Lower Orders under the illusion that they are the nobility. His aristocratic refusal to pay, which he adopts out of literary precedence, not personal feeling, never works out—he ends by overpaying. Again the language is the language of the feudal knight, but the be­havior is that of the Suffering Servant. This may be compared with the reverse situation in Moby Dick when Captain Ahab leaves his cabin boy in his captain's cabin and mounts the lookout like an ordinary seaman: here the behavior is ap- parendy humble, but is in fact the extremity of pride.

This-Worldliness

The Knight-Errant is this-worldly in that he succeeds in arms and in love. Don Quixote professes a similar hope but in fact is not only persistently defeated but also cannot in the end even maintain in combat that Dulcinea is without a rival. Thus, he not only has to suffer the Knight's trials but also must suffer the consciousness of defeat. He is never able to think well of himself. He uses the language of the epic hero, but reveals himself to us as the Knight of Faith whose king­dom is not of this world.

Don Quixote's Death

However many further adventures one may care to invent for Don Quixote—and, as in all cases of a true myth, they are potentially infinite—the conclusion can only be the one which Cervantes gives, namely, that he recovers his senses and dies. Despite the protestations of his friends, who want him to go on providing them with amusement, he must say: "Ne'er look for birds of this year in the nests of the last: I was mad but I am now in my senses: I was once Don Quixote de la Mancha but am now the plain Alonso Quixano, and I hope the sincerity of my words and my repentance may restore me the same esteem you have had for me before."

For, in the last analysis, the saint cannot be presented aesthetically. The ironic vision gives us a Don Quixote who is innocent of every sin but one; and that one sin he can put off only by ceasing to exist as a character in a book, for all such characters are condemned to it, namely, the sin of being at all times and under all circumstances interesting.

POSTSCRIPT: CHRISTIANITY & ART

Art is compatible with polytheism and with Christianity, but not with philosophical materialism; science is compatible with philosophical materialism and with Christianity, but not with polytheism. No artist or scientist, however, can feel comfort­able as a Christian; every artist who happens also to be a Christian wishes he could be a polytheist; every scientist in the same position that he could be a philosophical materialist. And with good reason. In a polytheist society, the artists are its theologians; in a materialist society, its theologians are the scientists. To a Christian, unfortunately, both art and science are secular activities, that is to say, small beer.

No artist, qua artist, can understand what is meant by God is Love or Thou shalt love thy neighbor because he doesn't care whether God and men are loving or unloving; no scientist, qua scientist, can understand what is meant because he doesn't care whether to-be-loving is a matter of choice or a matter of compulsion.

To the imagination, the sacred is self-evident. It is as mean­ingless to ask whether one believes or disbelieves in Aphrodite or Ares as to ask whether one believes in a character in a novel; one can only say that one finds them true or untrue to life. To believe in Aphrodite and Axes merely means that one be­lieves that the poetic myths about them dfo justice to the forces of sex and aggression as human beings experience them in nature and their own lives. That is why it is possible for an archaeologist who digs up a statuette of a god or goddess to say with fair certainty what kind of divinity it represents.

Similarly, to the imagination, the godlike or heroic man is self-evident. He does extraordinary deeds that the ordinary man cannot do, or extraordinary things happen to him.

The Incarnation, the coming of Christ in the form of a servant who cannot be recognized by the eye of flesh and blood, but only by the eye of faith, puts an end to all claims of the imagination to be the faculty which decides what is truly sacred and what is profane. A pagan god can appear on earth in disguise but, so long as he wears his disguise, no man is expected to recognize him nor can. But Christ appears look­ing just like any other man, yet claims that He is the Way, the Truth and the Life, and that no man can come to God the Father except through Him. The contradiction be­tween the profane appearance and the sacred assertion is impassible to the imagination.

It is impossible to represent Christ on the stage. If he is made dramatically interesting, he ceases to be Christ and turns into a Hercules or a Svengali. Nor is it really possible to represent him in the visual arts for, if he were visually recognizable, he would be a god of the pagan kind. The best the painter can do is to paint either the Bambino with the Madonna or the dead Christ on the cross, for every baby and every corpse seems to be both individual and universal, the baby, the corpse. But neither a baby nor a corpse can say I am the Way, etc.

To a Christian, the godlike man is not the hero who does extraordinary deeds, but the holy man, the saint, who does good deeds. But the gospel defines a good deed as one done in secret, hidden, so far as it is possible, even from the doer, and forbids private prayer and fasting in public. This means that art, which by its nature can only deal with what can and should be manifested, cannot portray a saint.

There can no more be a "Christian" art than there can be a Christian science or a Christian diet. There can only be a Christian spirit in which an artist, a scientist, works or does not work. A painting of the Crucifixion is not necessarily more Christian in spirit than a still life, and may very well be less.

I sometimes wonder if there is not something a bit question­able, from a Christian point of view, about all works of art which make overt Christian references. They seem to assert that there is such a thing as a Christian culture, which there cannot be. Culture is one of Caesar's things. One cannot help noticing that the great period of "religious" painting coincided with the period when the Church was a great temporal power.

The only kind of literature which has gospel authority is the parable, and parables are secular stories with no overt religious reference.

There are many hymns I like as one likes old song hits, be­cause, for me, they have sentimental associations, but the only hymns I find poetically tolerable are either versified dogma or Biblical ballads.

Poems, like many of Donne's and Hopkins', which express a poet's personal feelings of religious devotion or penitence, make me uneasy. It is quite in order that a poet should write a sonnet expressing his devotion to Miss Smith because the poet, Miss Smith, and all his readers know perfectly well that, had he chanced to fall in love with Miss Jones instead, his feelings would be exactly the same. But if he writes a sonnet expressing his devotion to Christ, the important point, surely, is that his devotion is felt for Christ and not for, say, Buddha or Mahomet, and this point cannot be made in poetry; the Proper Name proves nothing. A penitential poem is even more ques­tionable. A poet must intend his poem to be a good one, that is to say, an enduring object for other people to admire. Is there not something a litde odd, to say the least, about making an admirable public object out of one's feelings of guilt and penitence before God?

A poet who calls himself a Christian cannot but feel uncom­fortable when he realizes that the New Testament contains no verse (except in the apochryphal, and gnostic, Acts of John), only prose. As Rudolf Kassner has pointed out:

The difficulty about the God-man for the poet lies in the Word being made Flesh. This means that reason and imagination are one. But does not Poetry, as such, live from their being a gulf between them?

What gives us so clear a notion of this as metre, verse measures? In the magical-mythical world, metre was sacred, so was the strophe, the line, the words in the line, the letters. The poets were prophets.

That the God-man did not write down his words him­self or show the slightest concern that they should be written down in letters, brings us back to the Word made Flesh.

Over against the metrical structures of the poets stand the Gospel parables in prose, over against magic a freedom which finds its limits within itself, is itself limit, over against poetic fiction ( Dichtungpointing to and interpreting fact ([Deutung(Die Gehurt Christi

I hope there is an answer to this objection, but I don't know what it is.

The imagination is a natural human faculty and therefore retains the same character whatever a man believes. The only difference can be in the way that he interprets its data. At all times and in all places, certain objects, beings and events arouse in his imagination a feeling of sacred awe, while other objects, beings and events leave his imagination unmoved. But a Christian cannot say, as a polytheist can: "All before which my imagination feels sacred awe is sacred-in-itself, and all which leaves it unmoved is profane-in-itself. There are two possible interpretations a Christian can make, both of them, I believe, orthodox, but each leaning towards a heresy. Either he can say, leaning towards Neoplatonism: "That which arouses in me a feeling of sacred awe is a channel

through which, to me as an individual and as a member of a certain culture, the sacred which I cannot perceive directly is revealed to me." Or he can say, leaning towards pantheism: "All objects, beings and events are sacred but, because of my individual and cultural limitations, my imagination can only recognize these ones." Speaking for myself, I would rather, if I must be a heretic, be condemned as a pantheist than as a Neoplatonist.

In our urbanized industrial society, nearly everything we see and hear is so aggressively ugly or emphatically banal that it is difficult for a modern artist, unless he can flee to the depths of the country and never open a newspaper, to prevent his imagination from acquiring a Manichaean cast, from feeling, whatever his religious convictions to the contrary, that the physical world is utterly profane or the abode of demons. However sternly he reminds himself that the material universe is the creation of God and found good by Him, his mind is haunted by images of physical disgust, cigarette butts in a half-finished sardine can, a toilet that won't flush, etc.

Still, things might be worse. If an artist can no longer put on sacred airs, he has gained his personal artistic liberty in­stead. So long as an activity is regarded as being of sacred importance, it is controlled by notions of orthodoxy. When art is sacred, not only are there orthodox subjects which every artist is expected to treat and unorthodox subjects which no artist may treat, but also orthodox styles of treatment which must not be violated. But, once art becomes a secular activity, every artist is free to treat whatever subject excites his imag­ination, and in any stylistic manner which he feels appropriate.

We cannot have any liberty without license to abuse it. The secularization of art enables the really gifted artist to develop his talents to the full; it also permits those with little or no talent to produce vast quantities of phony or vulgar trash. When one looks into the window of a store which sells devotional art objects, one can't help wishing the iconoclasts had won.

For artists, things may very well get worse and, in large areas of the world, already have.

So long as science regards itself as a secular activity, ma­terialism is not a doctrine but a useful empirical hypothesis. A scientist, qua scientist, does not need, when investigating physical nature, to bother his head with ontological or teleo- logical questions any more than an artist, qua artist, has to bother about what his feelings of sacred awe may ultimately signify.

As soon, however, as materialism comes to be regarded as sacred truth, the distinction between the things of God and the things of Caesar is reabolished. But the world of sacred materialism is very different from the world of sacred poly­theism. Under polytheism, everything in life was, ultimately, frivolous, so that the pagan world was a morally tolerant world—far too tolerant, for it tolerated many evils, like slavery and the exposure of infants, which should not be tolerated. It tolerated them, not because it did not know that they were evil, but because it did not believe that the gods were neces­sarily good. (No Greek, for example, ever defended slavery, as slave owners in the Southern States defended it, on the grounds that their slaves were happier as slaves than they would be as freemen. On the contrary, they argued that the slave must be subhuman because, otherwise, he would have killed himself rather than endure life as a slave.)

But, under religious materialism, everything in life is, ultimately, serious, and therefore subject to moral policing. It will not tolerate what it knows to be evil with a heartless shrug—that is how life is, always has been and always will be—but it will do something which the pagan world never did; it will do what it knows to be evil for a moral purpose, do it deliberately now so that good may come in the future.

Under religious materialism, the artist loses his personal artistic liberty again, but he does not recover his sacred importance, for now it is not artists who collectively decide what is sacred truth, but scientists, or rather the scientific politicians, who are responsible for keeping mankind in the true faith. Under them, an artist becomes a mere technician, an expert in effective expression, who is hired to express effectively what the scientific politician requires to be said.

PART EIGHT

Homage to Igor Stravinsky

NOTES ON MUSIC AND OPERA

O-pera consists of significant situations in arti­ficially arranged sequence.

goethe

Singing is near miraculous because it is the mastering of what is otherwise a pure instrument of egotism: the human voice.

hugo von hofmannsthal

What is music about? What, as Plato would say, does it imitate? Our experience of Time in its twofold aspect, natural or organic repetition, and historical novelty created by choice. And the full development of music as an art depends upon a recognition that these two aspects are different and that choice, being an experience confined to man, is more significant than repetition. A succession of two musical notes is an act of choice; the first causes the second, not in the scientific sense of making it occur necessarily, but in the historical sense of provoking it, of providing it with a motive for occurring. A successful melody is a self-determined history; it is freely what it intends to be, yet is a meaningful whole, not an arbitrary succession of notes.

Music as an art, i.e., music that has come to a conscious reali­zation of its true nature, is confined to Western civilization alone and only to the last four or five hundred years at that. The music of all other cultures and epochs bears the same relation to Western music that magical verbal formulas bear to the art of poetry. A primitive magic spell may be poetry but it does not know that it is, nor intend to be. So, in all but Western music, history is only implicit; what it thinks it is doing is furnishing verses or movements with a repetitive accompaniment. Only in the West has chant become song.

Lacking a historical consciousness, the Greeks, in their theories of music, tried to relate it to Pure Being, but the becoming implicit in music betrays itself in their theories of harmony in which mathematics becomes numerology and one chord is intrinsically "better" than another.

Western music declared its consciousness of itself when it adopted time signatures, barring and the metronome beat. Without a stricdy natural or cyclical time, purified from every trace of historical singularity, as a framework within which to occur, the irreversible historicity of the notes themselves would be impossible.

In primitive proto-music, the percussion instruments which best imitate recurrent rhythms and, being incapable of melody, can least imitate novelty, play the greatest role.

The most exciting rhythms seem unexpected and complex, the most beautiful melodies simple and inevitable.

Music cannot imitate nature: a musical storm always sounds like the wrath of Zeus.

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become. But both are active, both insist on stopping or going on. The medium of passive reflec­tion is painting, of passive immediacy the cinema, for the visual world is an immediately given world where Fate is mistress and it is impossible to tell the difference between a chosen movement and an involuntary reflex. Freedom of choice lies, not in the world we see, but in our freedom to turn our eyes in this direction, or that, or to close them alto­gether.

Because music expresses the opposite experience of pure volition and subjectivity (the fact that we cannot shut our ears at will allows music to assert that we cannot not choose), film music is not music but a technique for preventing us from using our ears to hear extraneous noises and it is bad film music if we become consciously aware of its existence.

Man's musical imagination seems to be derived almost ex­clusively from his primary experiences—his direct experience of his own body, its tensions and rhythms, and his direct experience of desiring and choosing—and to have very little to do with the experiences of the outside world brought to him through his senses. The possibility of making music, that is, depends primarily, not upon man's possession of an audi­tory organ, the ear, but upon his possession of a sound-pro­ducing instrument, the vocal cords. If the ear were primary, music would have begun as program pastoral symphonies. In the case of the visual arts, on the other hand, it is a visual organ, the eye, which is primary for, without it, the experi­ences which stimulate the hand into becoming an expressive instrument could not exist.

The difference is demonstrated by the difference in our sensation of motion in musical space and visual space.

An increase in the tension of the vocal cords is conceived in musical space as a going "up," a relaxation as a going "down." But in visual space it is the bottom of the picture (which is also the foreground) which is felt as the region of greatest pressure and, as the eye rises up the picture, it feels an increasing sense of lightness and freedom.

The association of tension in hearing with up and seeing with down seems to correspond to the difference between our experience of the force of gravity in our own bodies and our experience of it in other bodies. The weight of our own bodies is felt as inherent in us, as a personal wish to fall down, so that rising upward is an effort to overcome the desire for rest in ourselves. But the weight (and proximity) of other objects is felt as weighing down on us; they are "on top" of us and rising means getting away from their restrictive pres­sure.

All of us have learned to talk, most of us, even, could be taught to speak verse tolerably well, but very few have learned or could ever be taught to sing. In any village twenty people could get together and give a performance of Hamlet which, however imperfect, would convey enough of the play's great­ness to be worth attending, but if they were to attempt a similar performance of Don Giovanni, they would soon dis­cover that there was no question of a good or a bad perform­ance because they could not sing the notes at all. Of an actor, even in a poetic drama, when we say that his perform­ance is good, we mean that he simulates by art, that is, consciously, the way in which the character he is playing would, in real life, behave by nature, that is, unconsciously. But for a singer, as for a ballet dancer, there is no question of simulation, of singing the composer's notes "naturally"; his behavior is unabashedly and triumphantly art from be­ginning to end. The paradox implicit in all drama, namely, that emotions and situations which in real life would be sad or painful are on the stage a source of pleasure becomes, in opera, quite explicit. The singer may be playing the role of a deserted bride who is about to kill herself, but we feel quite certain as we listen that not only we, but also she, is having a wonderful time. In a sense, there can be no tragic opera because whatever errors the characters make and what­ever they suffer, they are doing exactly what they wish. Hence the feeling that opera seria should not employ a contemporary subject, but confine itself to mythical situations, that is, situations which, as human beings, we are all of us necessarily in and must, therefore, accept, however tragic they may be. A contemporary tragic situation like that in Menotti's The

Consul is too actual, that is, too clearly a situation some people are in and others, including the audience, are not in, for the latter to forget this and see it as a symbol of, say, mans existential estrangement. Consequently the pleasure we and the singers are obviously enjoying strikes the conscience as frivolous.

On the other hand, its pure artifice renders opera the ideal dramatic medium for a tragic myth. I once went in the same week to a performance of Tristan und Isolde and a showing of L'Eternal Ret our > Jean Cocteau's movie version of the same story. During the former, two souls, weighing over two hundred pounds apiece, were transfigured by a trans­cendent power; in the latter, a handsome boy met a beautiful girl and they had an affair. This loss of value was due not to any lack of skill on Cocteau's part but to the nature of the cinema as a medium. Had he used a fat middle-aged couple the effect would have been ridiculous because the snatches of language which are all the movie permits have not sufficient power to transcend their physical appearance. Yet if the lovers are young and beautiful, the cause of their love looks "natural," a consequence of their beauty, and the whole meaning of the myth is gone.

The man who wrote the Eighth Symphony has a right to rebuke the man who put his rapture of elation, tenderness, and nobility into the mouths of a drunken libertine, a silly peasant girl, and a conventional fine lady, instead of confessing them to himself, glorying in them, and uttering them without modey as the uni­versal inheritance, (bernard shaw.)

Shaw, and Beethoven, are both wrong, I believe, and Mozart right. Feelings of joy, tenderness and nobility are not confined to "noble" characters but are experienced by every­body, by the most conventional, most stupid, most depraved. It is one of the glories of opera that it can demonstrate this and to the shame of the spoken drama that it cannot. Because we use language in everyday life, our style and vocabulary become identified with our social character as others see us, and in a play, even a verse play, there are narrow limits to the range in speech possible for any character beyond which the playwright cannot go without making the character incredible. But precisely because we do not communicate by singing, a song can be out of place but not out of character; it is just as credible that a stupid person should sing beauti­fully as that a clever person should do so.

If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in par­ticular is an imitation of human willfulness; it is rooted in the fact that we not only have feelings but insist upon having them at whatever cost to ourselves. Opera, therefore, cannot present character in the novelist's sense of the word, namely, people who are potentially good and bad, active and passive, for music is immediate actuality and neither potentiality nor passivity can live in its presence. This is something a librettist must never forget. Mozart is a greater composer than Rossini but the Figaro of the Marriage is less satisfying, to my mind, than the Figaro of the Barber and the fault, is, I think, Da Pontes. His Figaro is too interesting a character to be com­pletely translatable into music, so that co-present with the Figaro who is singing, one is conscious of a Figaro who is not singing but thinking to himself. The barber of Seville, on the other hand, who is not a person but a musical busybody, goes into song exacdy with nothing over.

Again, I find La Boheme inferior to Tosca, not because its music is inferior, but because the characters, Mimi in par­ticular, are too passive; there is an awkward gap between the resolution with which they sing and the irresolution with which they act.

The quality common to all the great operatic roles, e.g., Don Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Briinnhilde, is that each of them is a passionate and willful state of being. In real life they would all be bores, even Don Giovanni.

In recompense for this lack of psychological complexity, however, music can do what words cannot, present the im­mediate and simultaneous relation of these states to each other. The crowning glory of opera is the big ensemble.

The chorus can play two roles in opera and two only, that of the mob and that of the faithful, sorrowing or rejoicing community. A little of this goes a long way. Opera is not oratorio.

Drama is based on the Mistake. I think someone is my friend when he really is my enemy, that I am free to marry a woman when in fact she is my mother, that this person is a chamber­maid when it is a young nobleman in disguise, that this well-dressed young man is rich when he is really a penniless adventurer, or that if I do this such and such a result will follow when in fact it results in something very different. All good drama has two movements, first the making of the mis­take, then the discovery that it was a mistake.

In composing his plot, the librettist has to conform to this law but, in comparison to the dramatist, he is more limited in the kinds of mistake he can use. The dramatist, for instance, procures some of his finest effects from showing how people deceive themselves. Self-deception is impossible in opera be­cause music is immediate, not reflective; whatever is sung is the case. At most, self-deception can be suggested by having the orchestral accompaniment at variance with the singer, e.g., the jolly tripping notes which accompany Germont's approach to Violetta's deathbed in La Traviata, but unless employed very sparingly such devices cause confusion rather than insight.

Again, while in the spoken drama the discovery of the mistake can be a slow process and often, indeed, the more gradual it is the greater the dramatic interest, in a libretto the drama of recognition must be tropically abrupt, for music cannot exist in an atmosphere of uncertainty; song cannot walk, it can only jump.

On the other hand, the librettist need never bother his head, as the dramatist must, about probability. A credible situation in opera means a situation in which it is credible that someone should sing. A good libretto plot is a melodrama in both the strict and the conventional sense of the word; it offers as many opportunities as possible for the characters to be swept off their feet by placing them in situations which are too tragic or too fantastic for "words." No good opera plot can be sensible for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.

The theory of "music-drama" presupposes a libretto in which there is not one sensible moment or one sensible re­mark: this is not only very difficult to manage, though Wag­ner managed it, but also extremely exhausting on both singers and the audience, neither of whom may relax for an instant.

In a libretto where there are any sensible passages, i.e., conversation not song, the theory becomes absurd. If, for furthering the action, it becomes necessary for one character to say to another "Run upstairs and fetch me a handkerchief," then there is nothing in the words, apart from their rhythm, to make one musical setting more apt than another. Wherever the choice of notes is arbitrary, the only solution is a con­vention, e.g., recitativo secco.

In opera the orchestra is addressed to the singers, not to the audience. An opera-lover will put up with and even enjoy an orchestral interlude on condition that he knows the singers cannot sing just now because they are tired or the scene- shifters are at work, but any use of the orchestra by itself which is not filling in time is, for him, wasting it. Leonora III is a fine piece to listen to in the concert hall, but in the opera house, when it is played between scenes one and two of the second act of Fidelio, it becomes twelve minutes of acute boredom.

If the librettist is a practicing poet, the most difficult problem, the place where he is most likely to go astray, is the composi­tion of the verse. Poetry is in its essence an act of reflection, of refusing to be content with the interjections of immediate emotion in order to understand the nature of what is felt. Since music is in essence immediate, it follows that the words of a song cannot be poetry. Here one should draw a distinction between lyric and song proper. A lyric is a poem intended to be chanted. In a chant the music is subordinate to the words which limit the range and tempo of the notes. In song, the notes must be free to be whatever they choose and the words must be able to do what they are told.

The verses of Ah non credea in La Sonnambula, though of little interest to read, do exactly what they should: suggest to Bellini one of the most beautiful melodies ever written and then leave him completely free to write it. The verses which the librettist writes are not addressed to the public but are really a private letter to the composer. They have their moment of glory, the moment in which they suggest to him a certain melody; once that is over, they are as expendable as infantry to a Chinese general: they must efface themselves and cease to care what happens to them.

There have been several composers, Campion, Hugo Wolf, Benjamin Britten, for example, whose musical imagination has been stimulated by poetry of a high order. The question remains, however, whether the listener hears the sung words as words in a poem, or, as I am inclined to believe, only as sung syllables. A Cambridge psychologist, P. E. Vernon, once performed the experiment of having a Campion song sung with nonsense verses of equivalent syllabic value substituted for the original; only six per cent of his test audience noticed that something was wrong. It is precisely because I believe that, in listening to song (as distinct from chant), we hear, not words, but syllables, that I am not generally in favor of the performances of operas in translation. Wagner or Strauss in English sounds intolerable, and would still sound so if the poetic merits of the translation were greater than those of the original, because the new syllables have no apt relation to the pitch and tempo of the notes with which they are asso­ciated. The poetic value of the words may provoke a com­poser's imagination, but it is their syllabic values which determine the kind of vocal line he writes. In song, poetry is expendable, syllables are not.

"History," said Stephen Dedalus, "is the nightmare from which I must awake." The rapidity of historical change and the apparent powerlessness of the individual to affect Col­lective History has led in literature to a retreat from history.

Instead of tracing the history of an individual who is born, grows old and dies, many modern novelists and short story writers, beginning with Poe, have devoted their attention to timeless passionate moments in a life, to states of being. It seems to me that, in some modern music, I can detect the same trend, a trend towards composing a static kind of music in which there is no marked difference between its beginning, its middle and its end, a music which sounds remarkably like primitive proto-music. It is not for me to criticize a composer who writes such music. One can say, however, that he will never be able to write an opera. But, probably, he won't want to.

The golden age of opera, from Mozart to Verdi, coincided with the golden age of liberal humanism, of unquestioning belief in freedom and progress. If good operas are rarer today, this may be because, not only have we learned that we are less free than nineteenth-century humanism imagined, but also have become less certain that freedom is an unequivocal blessing, that the free are necessarily the good. To say that operas are more difficult to write does not mean that they are impossible. That would only follow if we should cease to believe in free will and personality altogether. Every high C accurately struck demolishes the theory that we are the irre­sponsible puppets of fate or chance.

CAV & PAG

If a perfume manufacturer were to adopt the "naturalistic" aesthetic, what hind of scents would he hottle?

paul valery

While we all know that every moment of life is a living moment, it is impossible for us not to feel that some moments are more lively than others, that certain experiences are clues to the meaning and essential structures of the whole flux of experience in a way that others are not. This selection is, in part, imposed by experience itself—certain events over­whelm us with their importance without our knowing why —and in part is due to a predisposition on our side, by personal temperament and by social tradition, to be open to some kinds of events and closed to others. Dante's encounter with Beatrice, for example, was given him, but he would probably not have received or interpreted the revelation in exactly the way that he did if the love poetry of Provence had never been written. On the other hand, many people before Wordsworth must have experienced feelings about Nature similar to his, but they had dismissed them as not very relevant.

Every artist holds, usually in common with his contempo­raries, certain presuppositions about the real Nature concealed behind or within the stream of phenomena, to which it is his artistic duty to be true, and it is these which condition the kind of art he produces as distinct from its quality.

Suppose that a dramatist believes that the most interesting and significant characteristic of man is his power to choose between right and wrong, his responsibility for his actions; then, out of the infinite number of characters and situations that life offers him, he will select situations in which the temptation to choose wrong is at its greatest and the actual consequences incurred by the choice are most serious, and he will select characters who are most free to choose, least in the position to blame their choice afterwards on circum­stances or other people.

At most periods in history he could find both of these most easily among the lives of the rich and powerful, and least among the lives of the poor. A king can commit a murder without fear of punishment by human law; a poor man can­not, so that, if the poor man refrains from committing one, we feel that the law, not he, is largely responsible. A king who steals a country is more interesting dramatically than a starv­ing peasant who steals a loaf, firstly because the country is so much bigger, and secondly because the king is not driven, like the peasant, by an impersonal natural need outside his control, but by a personal ambition which he could restrain.

For many centuries the dramatic role of the poor was to provide comic relief, to be shown, that is, in situations and with emotions similar to those of their betters but with this difference: that, in their case, the outcome was not tragic suffering. Needless to say, no dramatist ever believed that in real life the poor did not suffer but, if the dramatic function of suffering is to indicate moral guilt, then the relatively innocent cannot be shown on the stage as suffering. The comic similarity of their passions is a criticism of the great, a reminder that the king, too, is but a man, and the difference in destiny a reminder that the poor who, within their narrower captivity, commit the same crimes, are, by comparison, inno­cent.

Such a view might be termed the traditional view of Western culture against which naturalism was one form of revolt. As a literary movement, nineteenth-century naturalism was a corollary of nineteenth-century science, in particular of its biology. The evidence of Evolution, the discovery of some of the laws of genetics, for example, had shown that man was much more deeply embedded in the necessities of the natural order than he had imagined, and many began to believe that it was only a matter of time before the whole of man's existence, including his historical personality, would be found to be phenomena explicable in terms of the laws of science.

If the most significant characteristic of man is the complex of biological needs he shares with all members of his species, then the best lives for the writer to observe are those in which the role of natural necessity is clearest, namely, the lives of the very poor.

The difficulty for the naturalistic writer is that he cannot hold consistently to his principles without ceasing to be an artist and becoming a statistician, for an artist is by definition interested in uniqueness. There can no more be an art about the common man than there can be a medicine about the uncommon man. To think of another as common is to be in­different to his personal fate; to the degree that one loves or hates another, one is conscious of his or her uniqueness. All the characters in literature with universal appeal, those that seem to reveal every man to himself, are in character and situa­tion very uncommon indeed. A writer who is committed to a naturalist doctrine is driven by his need as an artist to be interesting to find a substitute for the tragic situation in the pathetic, situations of fantastic undeserved misfortune, and a substitute for the morally responsible hero in the patho­logical case.

The role of impersonal necessity, the necessities of nature or the necessities of the social order in its totality upon the human person can be presented in fiction, in epic poetry and, better still, in the movies, because these media can verbally describe or visually picture that nature and that order; but in drama, where they are forced to remain offstage—there can be no dramatic equivalent to Hardy's description of Egdon Heath in The Return of the Native—this is very difficult. And in opera it is impossible, firstly, because music is in its essence dynamic, an expression of will and self-affirmation and, sec­ondly, because opera, like ballet, is a virtuoso art; whatever his role, an actor who sings is more an uncommon man, more a master of his fate, even as a self-destroyer, than an actor who speaks. Passivity or collapse of the will cannot be expressed in song; if, for example, a tenor really sings the word "Piango," he does not cry, a fact of which some tenors, alas, are only too aware. It is significant as a warning sign that the concluding line of Cavalleria Rusticana, "Hanno ammazzato compare Turiddu," and the concluding line of Pagliacci, "La corn- media e finita," are spoken, not sung.

In practice, the theory of verismo, as applied to opera, meant substituting, in place of the heroic artistocratic setting of the traditional opera seria, various exotic settings, social and geo­graphic. Instead of gods and princes, it gives us courtesans (La Traviata, Manon), gypsies and bullfighters (Carmen), a diva (Tosca), Bohemian artists (La Boheme), the Far East (Madama Butterfly'), etc., social types and situations every bit as unfamiliar to the average operagoer as those of Olympus or Versailles.

Giovanni Verga was no doctrinaire naturalist. He wrote about the Sicilian peasants because he had grown up among them, knew them intimately, loved them and therefore could see them as unique beings. The original short story Cavalleria Rusticana which appeared in Vita dei Campi (1880) differs in several important respects from the dramatized version which Verga wrote four years later and upon which the libretto is based. In the short story the hero Turiddu is the relatively innocent victim of his poverty and his good looks. Santuzza is not the abused defenseless creature we know from the opera but a rich man's daughter who knows very well how to look after herself. Turiddu serenades her but he has no chance of marrying her since he has no money and though she likes him, she does not lose her head. Her betrayal to Alfio of Turiddu's affair with Lola is therefore much more malicious and unsympathetic than it is in the opera. Finally, the reason that Turiddu gives Alfio for insisting upon a fight to the death is not Santuzza's future—he has completely forgotten her—but the future of his penniless old mother.

Santuzza's seduction and pregnancy, Turiddu's brutal re­jection of her, her curse upon him, his final remorse were all added by Verga when he had to build up Santuzza into a big and sympathetic role for Duse. As a subject for a short libretto, it is excellent. The situation is strong, self-contained and im­mediately clear; it provides roles for a convenient number and range of voices; and the emotions involved are both singable emotions and easy to contrast musically. The psychology is straightforward enough for song but not silly: how right it is, for instance, that Turiddu should reproach Santuzza for hav­ing let him seduce her—"Pentirsi e vano do-po I'offesa." Thanks to the swiftness with which music can express a change in feeling, even Turiddu's sudden switch of attitude from contempt to remorse becomes much more plausible in the opera than it seems in the spoken drama. Targioni-Tozzetti and Menasci quite rightly stuck pretty closely to Verga's story, their chief addition being the lines in which Turiddu begs Lucia to accept Santuzza as a daughter. But, having at their disposal as librettists what a dramatist no longer has, a chorus, they took full advantage of it. The choral episodes, the chorus of spring, the mule-driving song, the Easter hymn, the drinking song take up more than a quarter of the score. It might have been expected that, particularly in so short a work, to keep postponing and interrupting the action so much would be fatal; but, in fact, if one asks what was the chief contribution of the librettists towards giving the work the peculiar impact and popularity it has, I think one must say it was precisely these episodes. Thanks to them, the action of the protagonists, their personal tragedy, is seen against an immense background, the recurrent death and rebirth of nature, the liturgical celebration of the once-and-for-all death and resurrection of the redeemer of man, the age-old social rites of the poor, so that their local history takes on a ritual significance; Turiddu's death is, as it were, a ritual sacrifice in atonement for the sins of the whole community. One of the most moving moments in the opera, for example—and nothing could he less verismo—occurs when Santuzza, the excom­municated girl who believes that she is damned, is translated out of her situation and starts singing out over the chorus, like Deborah the Prophetess, "Inneggiamo il Signor non e mortol" If the interplay of rite and personal action which is the secret of Cavalleria Rusticana is not a typical concern of the verismo school, the libretto interest of Pagliacci is even less naturalistic, for the subject is the psychological conundrum— "Who is the real me? Who is the real you?" This is presented through three contradictions. Firstly, the contradiction be­tween the artist who creates his work out of real joys and sufferings and his audience whom it amuses, who enjoy through its imaginary joys and sufferings which are probably quite different from those of its creator. Secondly, the con­tradiction between the actors who do not feel the emotions they are portraying and the audience who do, at least imag­inatively. And, lastly, the contradiction between the actors as professionals who have to portray imaginary feelings and the actors as men and women who have real feelings of their own. We are all actors; we frequently have to hide our real feelings for others and, alone with ourselves, we are constantly the victims of self-deception. We can never be certain that we know what is going on in the hearts of others, though we usually overestimate our knowledge—both the shock of dis­covering an infidelity and the tortures of jealousy are due to this. On the other hand, we are too certain that nobody else sees the real us.

In the Prologue, Tonio, speaking on behalf of Leoncavallo and then of the cast, reminds the audience that the artist and the actor are men. When we reach the play within the play all the contradictions are going simultaneously. Nedda is half- actress, half-woman, for she is expressing her real feelings in an imaginary situation; she is in love but not with Beppe who is playing Harlequin. Beppe is pure actor; as a man he is not in love with anybody. Tonio and Canio are themselves, for their real feelings and the situation correspond, to the greater amusement of the audience for it makes them act so convinc­ingly. Finally there is Nedda's lover Silvio, the member of the audience who has got into the act, though as yet invisibly. When Nedda as Columbine recites to Harlequin the line writ­ten for her, "A stannotte—e per sempre tua sard!" Canio as Pag- liaccio is tortured because he has heard her use, speaking as herself, these identical words to the lover he has not seen. One has only to imagine what the opera would be like if, with the same situation between the characters, the Commedia were omitted, to see how much the interest of the opera depends on the question of Illusion and Reality, a problem which is supposed only to concern idealists.

About the music of these two operas, I can, of course, only speak as a layman. The first thing that strikes me on hearing them is the extraordinary strength and vitality of the Italian operatic tradition. Since 1800 Italian opera had already pro­duced four fertile geniuses, Bellini, Rossini, Donizetti and Verdi, yet there was still enough left to allow, not only the lesser but still formidable figure of Puccini, but also the talents of Ponchielli, Giordano, Mascagni and Leoncavallo to create original and successful works. Today, indeed—it may have seemed different in the nineties—we are more conscious in the works of these later composers of the continuity of the tradition than of any revolutionary novelty. We do not emerge from the house, after hearing Cavalleria or Pagliacci for the first time, saying to ourselves, "What a strange new kind of opera!" No, before the first ten bars are over, we are thinking: "Ah, an­other Italian opera. How jolly!"

Comparing one with the other (a rather silly but inevitable habit), Leoncavallo strikes me as much more technically adroit. One of the strange things about Mascagni is the almost old-fashioned simplicity of his musical means; he writes as if he were scarcely aware of even the middle Verdi. There are dull passages in Cavalleria Rusticana, e.g., the music of the mule-driving song, but, in the dramatic passages, the very primitive awkwardness of the music seems to go with the characters and give them a conviction which Leoncavallo fails to give to his down-at-heel actors. For instance, when I listen to Turiddu rejecting Santuzza in the duet, "No, no! Turiddu, rimani," I can believe that I am listening to a village Don Giovanni, but when I listen to Silvio making love to Nedda in the duet, "Decidi, il mio destin," I know that I am listening to a baritone. As a listener, then, I prefer Mascagni; if I were a singer, I daresay my preference would be reversed.

In making their way round the world, Cav & Pag have had two great advantages: they are relatively cheap to produce and the vocal writing is effective but does not make excessive demands so that they are enjoyable even when performed by provincial touring companies, whereas works like La Gioconda or Fedora are intolerable without great stars. Take, for ex­ample, the famous aria "Vesti la giubba": if the singer is in good voice, he has a fine opportunity to put it through its paces; if his voice is going, he can always throw away the notes and just bellow, a procedure which some audiences seem to prefer.

All the various artistic battle cries, Classicism, Romanticism, Naturalism, Surrealism, The-language-really-used-by-men, The-music-of-the-future, etc., are of interest to art historians because of the practical help which, however absurd they may seem as theories, they have been to artists in discovering how to create the kind of works which were proper to their powers. As listeners, readers and spectators, we should take them all with a strong dose of salt, remembering that a work of art is not about this or that kind of life; it has life, drawn, certainly, from human experience but transmuted, as a tree transmutes water and sunlight into treehood, into its own unique being. Every encounter with a work of art is a personal encounter; what it says is not information but a revelation of itself which is simultaneously a revelation of ourselves. We may dislike any particular work we encounter or prefer another to it but, to the degree that our dislike or our preference is genuine, we admit its genuineness as a work of art. The only real negative judgment—it may be ourselves, not the works, that are at fault—is indifference. As Rossini put it: "All kinds of music are good except the boring kind."

TRANSLATING OPERA LIBRETTI

(Written in collaboration with Chester Kallman)

silva: The cwp's prepared, and so rejoice;

And more, I'll let thee have thy choice. (He proudly presents him a dagger and a cup of

poison)

from an old translation of Ernani

To discover just how arrogant and stupid reviewers can be, one must write something in collaboration with another writer. In a literary collaboration, if it is to be successful, the partners to it must surrender the selves they would be if they were writing separately and become one new author; though, obviously, any given passage must be written by one of them, the censor-critic who decides what will or will not do is this corporate personality. Reviewers think they know better, that they can tell who wrote what; I can only say that, in the case of our collaborations, their guesses as to which parts were actually written by Mr. Kallman and which my myself have been, at a conservative estimate, seventy-five per cent wrong.

Ten years ago, if anybody bad prophesied that we would one day find ourselves translating libretti, we would have thought him crazy. We had always been fanatic advocates of the tradition upheld by British and American opera houses of giving opera in its original tongue as against the European tradition of translation. If people want to know what is going on, we said, let them buy a libretto with an English crib and read it before coming to the opera house; even if they know Italian and German well, they should still do this because, in a performance, one rarely hears more than one word in ten. As regards performances in opera houses, we still feel pretty much the same way, but televised opera for mass audiences is another matter. Whether the TV audience could ever be persuaded to tolerate operas in foreign languages is doubtful, not only because mass audiences are lazy but also because, on a television set, every syllable can be heard so that the irritation caused by failing to understand what is said is greater than in an opera house. (And then, of course, the big broadcasting companies are willing to pay handsomely for translations and we saw no reason why, if a translation was going to be made, we shouldn't get the money.) Once we started, we felt our aesthetic prejudices weakening for a reason which is not per­haps a valid one since it is purely selfish: we found ourselves completely fascinated by the task.

The three libretti we have translated together so far are Da Ponte's libretto for Don Giovanni, Schikaneder-and-Giesecke's libretto for Die Zauberflote and Brecht's text for the song- ballet Die sieben Todsiinden with music by Kurt Weill. Each has its special problems. Don Giovanni is in Italian, with sung recitatives and, stylistically, an opera giocosa; Die Zauberflote is in German, written as a series of numbers with spoken dialogue in between and, stylistically, an opera magica. Die sieben Todsiinden is not a traditional opera in which, as Mozart said, "poetry absolutely has to be the obedient daughter of music," but, like all the Brecht-Weill collaborations, a work in which the words are at least as important as the music, and its language is that of contemporary speech and full of popular idiom.

In comparison with the ordinary translater, the translator of a libretto is much more strictly bound in some respects and much freer in others. Since the music is so infinitely more important than the text, the translator must start with the premise that his translation must demand no change of musical intervals or rhythms in order to fit it. This law is absolute for arias and ensembles; in recitative, occasions may arise when the drop­ping or addition of a note is justified, but they are very rare. The translator of a libretto, therefore, has to produce a version which is rhythmically identical, not with the verse prosody of the original as it would be spoken, but with the musical prosody as it is sung. The difficulty in achieving this lies in the fact that musical prosody is both quantitative, like Greek and Latin verse, and accentual like English and German. In a quantitative prosody, syllables are either long or short and one long syllable is regarded as being equal in length to two short syllables; in an accentual prosody like our own, the length of the syllables is ignored—metrically, they are re­garded as all being equal in length—and the distinction is between accented and unaccented syllables. This means that the rhythmical value of the trisyllabic feet and the dissyllabic feet are the reverse in a quantitative prosody from what they are in an accentual. Thus

A quantitative dactyl or anapaest is in 4/4 or 2/4 time. (March time.)

A quantitative trochee or iamb is in 3/4 or 6/8 time. (Waltz time.)

An accentual dactyl or anapaest is in waltz time. An accentual trochee or iamb in march time.

But in music both quantity and accent count:

A 2/4 bar made up of a half note followed by two quarter notes is, quantitatively, a dactyl but, accentually, a bacchic.

A musical triplet jf) is, quantitatively, a tribrach but, accentually, a dactyl.

To add to the translators' troubles, the felt tempo of the spoken word and of musical notes is utterly different. If, timing myself with a stop watch, I recite, first the most rapid piece of verse I can think of—The Nightmare Son from Iolanthe, let us say—and then the slowest verse I can think of—Tennyson's Tears, idle tears—I find that the proportional difference be­tween the time taken in each case to recite the same number of syllables is, at most, 2,-1, and much of this difference is attributable, not to the change in speed of uttering the syllables but to the pauses in speaking which I make at the caesuras in the slow piece. Further, the two tempi at which I speak them both lie in what is in music the faster half of the tempo range. The tempo which in speaking verse is felt to be an adagio is felt in music as an allegretto. The consequence of this differ­ence is that, when a composer sets verses to a slow tempo, verse dactyls and anapaests turn into molossoi, its trochees and iambs into spondees. The line Now thank -we all our God is iambic when spoken but spondaic when sung.

This means that it is not enough for the translator to read the verses of the libretto, scan them, and produce a prosodic copy in English for, when he then matches his copy against the score, he will often find that the musical distortion of the spoken rhythm which sounded possible in the original tongue sounds impossible in English. This is particularly liable to happen when translating from Italian because, even when speaking, an Italian has a far greater license in prolonging or shortening the length of his syllables than an Englishman.

Two Examples

O In Leporello's aria at the beginning of Don Giovanni occurs the line Ma mi par che venga gente (But it seems to me that people are coming).

To begin with, we decided that Leporello must say something else. He is on guard outside the house where Don Giovanni is raping or trying to rape Donna Anna. Da Ponte's line suggests that a crowd of strangers are about to come on stage; actually, it will only be Don Giovanni pursued by Donna Anna and some time will elapse before the Commendatore enters. Our first at­tempt was

What was that? There's trouble brewing.

Spoken, che venga gente and there's trouble brewing sound more or less metrically equivalent, but the phrase is set to three eighth notes and two quarter notes, so that gente which, when spoken, is a trochee becomes a spondee. But brewing, because of the lack of consonants between the syllables, sounds distorted as a spondee, so we had to revise the line to

What was that? We're in for trouble,

2,) When Tamino approaches the doors of Sarastro's temple, a bodiless voice cries Zuriick!, strongly accentuat­ing the second syllable. This looks easy to translate liter­ally by Go Back! and, were the tempo a slow one, it could be. Unfortunately, the tempo indication is allegro assai and at that speed, the two English monosyllables sound like a nonsense disyallable geBACK. Another solution had to be found; ours was Beware!

Sometimes the translator is forced to depart from the original text because of differences in the sound and association be­tween the original and its exact English equivalent. Take, for example, the simple pair, Ja and Nein, Si and No, Yes and No. In the Leporello-Giovanni duet Eh, via buffone which is sung allegro assai, Leporello's two stanza's are built around the use of no in the first and si in the second.

Ed io non burlo, ma voglio andar. No, no, padrone, v'andar vi dico. No! No! No!

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Non vo' resteer, si! Si! Si! Si!

Si, si, si, si, si, si, si, si, si, si!

In English as in Italian, one can sing rapidly no, no, no, no . . . but one cannot sing yes, yes, yes, yes . . . The opening lines of Tamino's first aria run

Dies Etwas kann ich zwar nicht nennen, Dock fiikl ich's kier wie Fewer brennen;

Soil die Empfindung JLiebe sein?

Ja, J a,

Die Liebe ist's allein.

The tempo this time is moderate so that it is physically pos­sible to sing Yes, Yes, but Yes-Yes in our culture has a comic or at least unromantic association with impatience or boredom. Similarly, one cannot translate Komm, Komm which occurs in one of the choruses in the same opera as Come, Come, without making the audience laugh.

Another problem is that feminine rhymes which are the commonest kind in Italian and frequent in German, are not only much rarer in English, but most of the ones that do exist are comic rhymes. It is possible for a competent versifier to copy the original rhyme scheme but often at the cost of making the English sound like Gilbert and Sullivan. On rare occa­sions such as Leporello's Catalogue aria, the tendency of double rhymes to be funnier in English than in Italian can be an advantage but, in any tender or solemn scene, it is better to have no rhyme at all than a ridiculous one. The marble statue rebukes Don Giovanni in the churchyard scene with the couplet

Hibalde, audace,

Lascia'l morti in pace.

Here any rhyme in English will sound absurd.

Then, languages differ not only in their verbal forms, but also in their rhetorical traditions, so that what sounds perfectly natural in one language, can, when literally translated, sound embarrassing in another. All Italian libretti are full of poly­syllabic interjections; such as Traditore! Scelerato! SconsigliatoI Sciugurato! SventuratoI etc., and these sound effective, even at moments of high emotion. But in the English language, aside from the fact that most of our interjections are one or two syllables long, they are seldom, if ever, used in serious situations and are mosdy employed in slanging matches be­tween schoolboys or taxicab drivers. In serious situations we tend, I think, to make declarative statements; instead of shout­ing Traditoref (Vile seducer!) to shout You betrayed me!

Now and again the translator may feel that a change is necessary, not because the habits of two languages are different but because what the librettist wrote sounds too damn silly in any language. When Donna Anna, Donna Elvira, and Don Ottavio arrive at Don Giovanni's party in the finale of Act I, Donna Elvira sings

Bisogn' aver corraggio,

O cari' amici miei.

which is perfectly sensible, but Don Ottavio's reply is not.

L'amica dice benel

Corragio' aver conviene.

that is to say:

Our lady friend says wisely;

Some courage would do nicely.

Nor in the finale to Die Zauberflote when the Spirits see Pamina approaching distraught, can one allow them to say, as they do in German:

Where is she, then?

She is out of her senses.

With such alterations, no musician or musicologist is likely to quarrel. A more controversial matter is syllabification, for some purists consider the original syllabification and slurs to be as sacrosanct as the notes themselves. We believe, however, that there are occasions, at least in libretti written before 1850, when changes in syllabification are justifiable. In the days of Mozart and Rossini, the speed at which operas were expected to be turned out made any studied collaboration between librettist and composer impossible. The librettists produced his verses and the composer set them as best he could; he might ask for an extra aria but not for detailed revisions. The insistence shown by Verdi in his later years, by Wagner and by Strauss upon having a text which exactly matched their musical ideas was unknown. Mozart frequently spreads a syllable over two or more notes, and not in coloratura runs only. In many cases, his reason for doing so was, we believe, quite simple: his musical idea contained more notes than the verse he had been given contained syllables—just as, when he has not been given enough lines for his music, he repeats them.

Now it so happens that in English, on account of its vowels and its many monosyllabic words, there are fewer syllables which sing well and are intelligible when spread over several notes than there are in either Italian or German; English is, intrinsically, a more staccato tongue. The first stanza of the duet between Papageno and Pamina runs thus:

Bei Mannern welche Liebe fiihlen Fehlt auch ein gutes Herze nicht. Die siissen Triebe mitzufiihlen 1st dann des Weibes erste Pflicht.

The rhythm is iambic, that is to say in 4/4 time. But Mozart has set it to a tune in 6/8 time so, to make the words fit, he spreads each accented syllable over two notes linked by a slur. It is, of course, not difficult to write an English iambic quatrain.

When Love his dart has deep implanted, The hero's heart grows kind and tame. And by his passion soon enchanted, The nymph receives the ardent flame.

But, to our ears, this sounded wrong somehow; they kept demanding an anapaestic quatrain which would give one syllable to every note of the melody.

When Love in his bosom desire has implanted, The heart of the hero grows gentle and tame. And soon by his passion enkindled, exchanged, The nymph receives the impetuous flame.

This, of course, involves doing away with the slurs in the score, and some purists may object. One can only ask singers to sing both iambic and anapaestic versions several times with­out prejudice and then ask themselves which, in English, sounds the more Mozartian.

All such details which demand the translator's attention are part of the more general and important problem of finding the right literary style for any given opera. The kind of diction suitable to an opera seria, for example, is unsuitable in an opera buff a, nor can a supernatural character like the Queen of the Night use the speech of a courtesan like Violetta. In deciding upon a style for a particular opera, the translator has to trust his intuition and his knowledge of the literature, both in the original tongue and in his own, of the period in which the opera is supposed to be set. While he must obviously avoid solecisms, the literary traditions of any two languages are so different that a puristic exactness is often neither necessary nor even desirable; it does not follow that the best equivalent for the Italian spoken and written in 1790 is the English spoken in that year.

Scene Five of Don Giovanni shows the peasants dancing. Zerlina sings:

Giovinette, che fate, all'amore, che fate, all'amore, Non lasciate, che passi I'eta, Che passi I'eta, Che passi I'eta. Se nel seno vi bulica il core, bulica il core, II rimedio vedetelo qua. Che piacer, che piacer, che sara.

Given the character of the music, it seemed to us that the natural English equivalent was not something late-eighteenth- century like Da Ponte's Italian, but Elizabethan pastoral.

Pretty maid with your graces adorning the dew-spangled

morning,

The red rose and the white fade away, Both wither away, All fade in a day.

Of your pride and unkindness relenting, to kisses

consenting,

All the pains of your shepherd allay.

As the cuckoo flies over the may.

A different kind of stylistic problem is presented by the Brecht-Weill ballet Die sieben Todsiinden which is set in a contemporary but mythical America. A contemporary Amer­ican diction is called for, but it must not be too specifically so or the mythical element will disappear. Thus, while the translation must not contain words which are only used in British English—haus must be translated as home not as house—it would be wrong, although the family are said to live in Louisiana, to translate the German into the speech of American Southerners.

In one chorus the family list various delicious foods.

Hornchen! Schnitzel! Spar gel! Huhnchen! Und die kleinen gelben Honigkiichen

that is:

Muffins! Cudets! Asparagus! Chickens! And those little yellow honey-buns!

Though Americans do eat all of these, they do not make a characteristic list of what Americans, particularly from the South, would think of with the greatest greedy longing. Accordingly, we changed the list to:

Crabmeat! Porkchops! Sweet-corn! Chicken! And those golden biscuits spread with honey!

The images and metaphors characteristic of one culture and language are not always as effective in another. Thus, a literal translation of one of the verses sung by Anna in Lust would go:

And she shows her litde white backside, Worth more than a little factory, Shows it gratis to starers and corner-boys, To the profane look of the world.

The most powerful line in this verse is the second, but, in American English, "a little factory" makes no impact. Some other comparison must be thought of:

Now she shows off her white litde fanny, Worth twice a little Texas motel,

And for nothing the poolroom can stare at Annie As though she'd nothing to sell.

Translating Arias

An aria very rarely contains information which it is essential for the audience to know in order to understand the action and which must, therefore, be translated literally; all that a translation of an aria must do is convey the emotion or conflict of emotions which it expresses. At the same time, the arias in an opera are as a rule its high points musically, so that it is in them that the quality of the translation matters most. So far as an original librettist is concerned, all that matters is that his verses should inspire the composer to write beautiful music, but the translator is in a different position. The music is already there, and it is his duty to make his verses as worthy of it as he can.

Before Wagner and Verdi in his middle years, no com­poser worried much about the libretto; he took what he was given and did the best he could with it. This was possible because a satisfactory convention had been established as to the styles and forms in which libretti should be written which any competent versifier could master. This meant, however, that, while a composer could be assured of getting a settable text, one libretto was remarkably like another; all originality and interest had to come from the music. Today, it is idle to pretend that we can listen to a Mozart opera with the ears of his contemporaries, as if we had never heard the operas of Wagner, the late Verdi and Strauss in which the libretto plays an important role. In listening to a Mozart opera, we cannot help noticing when the text is banal or silly, or becom­ing impatient when a line is repeated over and over again. Having the beautiful music in his ears, a modern translator must feel it his duty to make his version as worthy of it as he can.

O Don Ottavio's first aria

Dalla sua pace La mia depende, Quelch'al lei piace Vita mi rende,

Quel che I'incresce Morte mi da. S'ella sospira Sospir' anchio, E mia quell'ira Que pianto & mio, E non ho hene S'ella non I'ha

Upon her peace / my peace depends / what pleases her / grants me life/and what saddens her/gives me death. If she sighs /1 also sigh / mine is her anger / and her grief is mine/I have no joy/if she has none.

When one compares English poetry with Italian or that of any Romance language, one sees that English poetic speech is more concrete in its expressions; an English poet writing a love lyric tends to express his feelings in terms of imagery and metaphors drawn from nature, rather than stating them directly. Further, English and Italian notions of what it is proper for an amorous male to say and do are different. To an English sensibility, Ottavio's exclusive con­centration upon himself—she mustn't be unhappy because it makes him unhappy—is a bit distasteful. Lastly, Da Ponte's lyric contains only a single idea repeated over and over again with but slight variations, but Mozart has given his second stanza a completely different musical treatment. Accordingly we tried to write a lyric which should be a) more concrete in diction, b) make Ottavio think more about Donna Anna than himself and c) less repetitive.

Shine, Lights of Heaven, Guardians immortal, Shine on my true love, Waking or sleeping, Sun, moon and starlight, Comfort her woe.

O nimble breezes, O stately waters,

Obey a lover, Proclaim her beauty And sing her praises Where'er you go.

(da capo) When grief beclouds her, I walk in shadow, My thoughts are with her, Waking or sleeping; Sun, moon and starlight, Comfort her woe.

2,) Pamina's Aria in Die Zauberflote, Act II

Ach, ich fuhl's, es ist verschwunden

Ewig hin, mein ganzes Gluck, der Liebe Gliick.

Nimmer hommt ihr, Wonne-stunden

Nleinem Herzen mehr zuriick.

Sieh, Tamino

Diese Tranen fliessen, Trauter, dir allein, dir allein.

Fiihlst du nicht der Liebe Sehnen, Liebe Sehnen,

So ivird Ruhe im Tode sein.

Fiihlst du nicht der Liebe Sehnen,

Fiihlst du nicht der Liebe Sehnen,

So wird Ruhe im Tode sein,

Im Tode sein.

(Ah, I feel it / it has vanished / for ever away / the joy of love. Never will you come / hours of wonder / back to my heart / See, Tamino / these tears flowing, beloved, for you alone / If you do not feel the sighs of love / then there will be peace in death.)

The aria contains a number of high notes, long runs and phrases which repeat like an echo. Any English version, therefore, must provide open vowels for the high notes and runs, and phrases which can sound like echoes. There is a certain kind of English poetry which is based upon the

repetition of a word or words in slightly different context, for instance, Donne's "The Expiation."

Go, go, and if that word hath not quite killed thee,

Ease me with death by bidding me go too,

Or, if it have, let my word work on me

And a just office on a murderer do;

Except it be too late to kill me so,

Being double dead, going and bidding go.

Given Pamina's situation it seemed to us that we might make use of this style and build our lyric round the words silent and grief.

Hearts may break though grief be silent, True hearts make their love their lives, Silence love with ended lives; Love that dies in one false lover Kills the heart where love survives.

O Tamino, see the silence Of my tears betray my grief, Faithful grief.

If you flee my love in silence, In faithless silence, Let my sorrow die with me. If you can betray Pamina, If you love me not, Tamino, Let my sorrow die with me And silent be.

3) Donna Anna's last aria in Don Giovanni. This consists of an orchestral recitative, a cavatina and a caba- letta.

recit: Crudele? Ah no, mia hene. Troppo mi

spiace

allontanarti un hen che lungamente la nostra

alma desia . . . Ma, il mondo . . . O DioI. . . Ahhastanza

per te mi parla amore. Non sedur la con-

stanza del sensibil mio coreI

CAVATiNA: Non mi dir, bell'idol mio, Che son io crudel con te; Tu ben sai quant'io t'amai, Tu conosci la mia fe, Tu conosci la mia fe. Calma, calm'il tuo tormento, Se di duol non vuoi ch'io mora, Non vuoi ch'io mora Non mi dir, bell'idol mio, Che son io crudel con te; Calma, calm'il, etc. . . .

cabaletta: forse, forse un giorn'il cielo Sentira pieta di me.

(Cruel? O no, my dear. Too much it grieves me to withhold from you a joy that for a long time our soul desires. But, the world . . . O God! Do not weaken the constancy of my suffering heart. Sufficiently for you Love speaks to me.

Do not tell me, my dearest dear,

That I am cruel to you;

You know well how much I love you,

You know my fidelity,

Calm your torment

If you do not wish me to die of grief.

Perhaps, one day, Heaven Will take pity on me.

The aria is one of the most beautiful which Mozart ever wrote, but the words are of an appalling banality and make Donna Anna very unsympathetic, now leading poor Don Ottavio on, now repulsing him. We felt, therefore, that we must forget the orginal text entirely and write something quite new. In a coloratura aria of this kind, it is wise to start with translating or reinventing the cabaletta which, like a cadenza, is written to provide the singer with the opportunity to display her vocal virtuosity in runs and range of pitch. This means that, whatever lines one writes, the key syllables must contain long open vowels, preferably a, ex and ae. Ac­cordingly, the first line of the aria we composed was the last, after taking a hint from the cielo in the preceding line.

On my dark His light shall break.

We then wrote a line to precede it and complete the caba­letta:

God will surely wipe away thy tears, my daughter, On thy (my) dark His light shall break.

These lines suggested the idea that they might be some kind of message from Heaven, so that some lines, at least, of the cavatina would be concerned with where the message was coming from. We then remembered that, in the graveyard scene which immediately precedes it, Don Giovanni mentions that it is a cloudless night with a full moon, and that the supper scene which immediately follows it opens with the Don's hired musicians playing suitable supper music. These two facts suggested two ideas: a) that Donna Anna might be gazing at the full moon, from which, so to speak, the mes­sage of her cabaletta would emanate and b) effective use might be made of the Neoplatonic contrast between the music of the spheres which her "spiritual" ear catches from the moon and the carnal music of this world as represented by the supper music. The stage direction in the piano score we were using says A darkened chamber, but there seems to be nothing about the action which makes this necessary. WTiy shouldn't the chamber have an uncurtained open window through which the moon could be seen? Accordingly, we changed the stage direction and wrote the aria as follows:

recit: Disdain you, Hear me, my dearest! None

can foretell what the rising sun may bring, a day of sorrow or a day of rejoicing. But, hear me! Remember, when the jealous

misgivings of a lover beset you, all the stars shall fall down 'ere I forget you!

cavatina: Let yonder moon, chaste eye of heaven Cool desire and calm your soul; May the bright stars their patience lend you As their constellations roll, Turn, turn, turn about the Pole. Far, too far they seem from our dying, Cold we call them to our sighing; We, too, proud, too evil-minded, By sin are blinded.

See, how bright the moon shines yonder, Silent witness to all our wrong: Ah! but hearken! O blessed wonder! Out of silence comes a music, And I can hear her song.

cabaletta: "God will surely, surely, wipe away thy tears, my daughter, On thy dark His light shall break. God is watching thee, hath not forgotten thee,

On thy dark His light shall break." God will heed me, sustain me, console me. On my dark His light shall break.

Any one who attempts to translate from one tongue into another will know moods of despair when he feels he is wasting his time upon an impossible task but, irrespective of success or failure, the mere attempt can teach a writer much about his own language which he would find it hard to learn elsewhere. Nothing else can more naturally correct our ten­dency to take our own language for granted. Translating compels us to notice its idiosyncracies and limitations, it makes us more attentive to the sound of what we write and, at the same time, if we are inclined to fall into it, will cure us of the heresy that poetry is a kind of music in which the rela­tions of vowels and consonants have an absolute value, ir­respective of the meaning of the words.

MUSIC IN SHAKESPEARE

Mustek to heare, why hear'st thou musick sadly, Sweets with sweets warre not, joy delights in joy: Why lov'st thou that which thou receav'st not gladly,

Or else receav'st with pleasure thine annoy?

jfft

Professor Wilson Knight and others have pointed out the im­portant part played in Shakespeare's poetry hy images related to music, showing, for instance, how music occupies the place in the cluster of good symbols which is held in the bad cluster by the symbol of the Storm.

His fondness for musical images does not, of course, neces­sarily indicate that Shakespeare himself was musical—some very good poets have been musically tone deaf. Any poet of the period who used a musical imagery would have attached the same associations to it, for they were part of the current Renaissance theory of the nature of music and its effects.

Anyone at the time, if asked, "What is music?" would have given the answer stated by Lorenzo to Jessica in the last scene of The Merchant of Venice. Mr. James Hutton in an admirable article in the English Miscellany on "Some English Poems in praise of Music" has traced the history of this theory from Pythagoras to Ficino and shown the origin of most of Lorenzo's images. The theory may be summarized thus:

O Music is unique among the arts for it is the only art practiced in Heaven and by the unfallen crea­tures. Conversely, one of the most obvious character­istics of Hell is its discordant din.

2,) Human reason is able to infer that this heavenly music exists because it can recognize mathematical proportions. But the human ear cannot hear it, either because of man's Fall or simply because the ear is a bodily organ subject to change and death. What Campanella calls the molino vivo of the self drowns out the celestial sounds. In certain exceptional states of ecstasy, however, certain individuals have heard it.

Man-made music, though inferior to the music which cannot be heard, is a good for, in its mortal way, it re­calls or imitates the Divine order. In consequence, it has great powers. It can tame irrational and savage beasts, it can cure lunatics, it can relieve sorrow. A dislike of music is a sign of a perverse will that defiantly refuses to submit to the general harmony.

Not all music, however, is good. There is a bad kind of music which corrupts and weakens. "The Devil rides a fiddlestick." Good is commonly associated with old music, bad with new.

Nobody today, I imagine, holds such a theory, i.e., nobody now thinks that the aesthetics of music have anything to do with the science of acoustics. What theory of painting, one wonders, would have developed if Pythagoras had owned a spectroscope and learned that color relations can also be ex­pressed in mathematical proportions.

But if he has never heard of the theory, there are many things in Shakespeare which the playgoer will miss. For ex­ample, the dramatic effect of the recognition scene in Pericles.

pericles : But what music?

helicanus: My lord, I hear none.

pericles: None! The music of the

spheres! List, my Marina! LYSIMACHUS: It is not good to cross him: give

him way.

pericles: Rarest sounds! Do ye not hear? helicanus: My Lord, I hear.

(Act V, Scene i.)

or even such a simple little joke as this from Othello:

clowtnt: If you have any music that may

not be heard, to't again; but, as they say, to hear music the general does not greatly care. ist. mus.: We have none such, sir.

(Act III, Scene i.)

Music is not only an art with its own laws and values; it is also a social fact. Composing, performing, listening to music are things which human beings do under certain circum­stances just as they fight and make love. Moreover, in the Elizabethan age, music was regarded as an important social fact. A knowledge of music, an ability to read a madrigal part were expected of an educated person, and the extraordinary output of airs and madrigals between 1588 and 1620 testifies to both the quantity and quality of the music making that must have gone on. When Bottom says, "I have a reasonable good ear in music: let's have the tongs and the bones," it is not so much an expression of taste as a revelation of class, like dropping one's aitches; and when Benedick says, "Well, a horn for my money when all's done," he is being deliberately epatant.

Whether he personally cared for music or not, any drama­tist of the period could hardly have failed to notice the part played by music in human life, to observe, for instance, that the kind of music a person likes or dislikes, the kind of way in which he listens to it, the sort of occasion on which he wants to hear or make it, are revealing about his character.

A dramatist of a later age might notice the same facts, but it would be difficult for him to make dramatic use of them unless he were to write a play specifically about musi­cians.

But the dramatic conventions of the Elizabethan stage per­mitted and encouraged the introduction of songs and instru­mental music into the spoken drama. Audiences liked to hear them, and the dramatist was expected to provide them. The average playgoer, no doubt, simply wanted a pretty song as part of the entertainment and did not bother about its dramatic relevance to the play as a whole. But a dramatist who took his art seriously had to say, either, "Musical num­bers in a spoken play are irrelevant episodes and I refuse to put them in just to please the public," or, "I must conceive my play in such a manner that musical numbers, vocal or in­strumental, can occur in it, not as episodes, but as essential elements in its structure."

If Shakespeare took this second line, it should be possible, on examining the occasions where he makes use of music, to find answers to the following questions:

O Why is this piece of music placed just where it is and not somewhere else?

In the case of a song, why are the mood and the words of this song what they are? Why this song instead of another?

Why is it this character who sings and not another? Does the song reveal something about his character which could not be revealed as well in any other way?

What effect does this music have upon those who listen to it? Is it possible to say that, had the music been omitted, the behavior of the characters or the feelings of the audience would be different from what they are?

II

When we now speak of music as an art, we mean that the elements of tone and rhythm are used to create a struc­ture of sounds which are to be listened to for their own sake. If it be asked what such music is "about," I do not think it too controversial to say that it presents a virtual image of our experience of living as temporal, with its double aspect of recurrence and becoming. To "get" such an image, the listener must for the time being banish from his mind all immediate desires and practical concerns and only think what he hears.

But rhythm and tone can also be used to achieve non- musical ends. For example, any form of physical movement, whether in work or play, which involves accurate repetition is made easier by sounded rhythmical beats, and the psycho­logical effect of singing, whether in unison or in harmony, upon a group is one of reducing the sense of diversity and strengthening the sense of unity so that, on all occasions where such a unity of feeling is desired or desirable, music has an important function.

If the true concord of well-tuned sounds By unions marred do offend thine ear, They do but sweetly chide thee, who confounds In singleness the parts that thou shouldst bear. Mark how one string, sweet husband to another, Strikes each in each by mutual ordering; Resembling sire and child and happy mother, Who all in one, one pleasing note do sing; Whose speechless song, being many, seeming one, Sings this to thee, "Thou single wilt prove none."

(Sonnet VIII.)

The oddest example of music with an extramusical purpose is the lullaby. The immediate effect of the rocking rhythm and the melody is to fix the baby's attention upon an or­dered pattern so that it forgets the distractions of arbitrary noises, but its final intention is to make the baby fall asleep, that is to say, to hear nothing at all.

Sounds, instrumental or vocal, which are used for social purposes, may of course have a musical value as well but this is usually secondary to their function. If one takes, say, a sea-shanty out of its proper context and listens to it on the gramophone as one might listen to a lied by Schubert, one is very soon bored. The beauty of sound which it may have been felt to possess when accompanied by the sensation of muscular movement and visual images of sea and sky cannot survive without them.

The great peculiarity of music as an art is that the sounds which comprise its medium can be produced in two ways, by playing on specially constructed instruments and by using the human vocal cords in a special way. Men use their vocal cords for speech, that is, to communicate with each other, but also, under certain conditions, a man may feel, as we say, "like singing." This impulse has little, if anything, to do with communication or with other people. Under the pressure of a certain mood, a man may feel the need to ex­press that mood to himself by using his vocal cords in an exceptional way. If he should sing some actual song he has learned, he chooses it for its general fitness to his mood, not for its unique qualities.

None of the other arts seem suited to this immediate self- expression. A few poets may compose verses in their bath— I have never heard of anyone trying to paint in his bath—but almost everyone, at some time or other, has sung in his bath.

In no other art can one see so clearly a distinction, even a rivalry, between the desire for pattern and the desire for personal utterance, as is disclosed by the difference between instrumental and vocal music. I think I can see an analogous distinction in painting. To me, vocal music plays the part in music that the human nude plays in painting. In both there is an essential erotic element which is always in danger of being corrupted for sexual ends but need not be and, without this element of the erotic which the human voice and the nude have contributed, both arts would be a little lifeless.

In music it is from instruments that rhythmical and tonal precision and musical structure are mostly derived so that, without them, the voice would have remained tied to im­promptu and personal expression. Singers, unchastened by the orchestral discipline, would soon lose interest in singing and wish only to show off their voices. On the other hand, the music of a dumb race who had invented instruments would be precise but dull, for the players would not know what it means to strive after expression, to make their instruments "sing." The kind of effect they would make is the kind we condemn in a pianist when we say: "He just plays the notes."

Lastly, because we do not have the voluntary control over our ears that we have over our eyes, and because musical sounds do not denote meanings like words or represent ob­jects like lines and colors, it is far harder to know what a person means, harder even for himself to know, when he says, "I like this piece of music," than when he says, "I like this book or this picture." At one extreme there is the professional musician who not only thinks clearly and completely what he hears but also recognizes the means by which the com­poser causes him so to think. This does not mean that he can judge music any better than one without his technical knowledge who has trained himself to listen and is familiar with music of all kinds. His technical knowledge is an added pleasure, perhaps, but it is not itself a musical experience. At the other extreme is the student who keeps the radio playing while he studies because he finds that a background of sound makes it easier for him to concentrate on his work. In his case the music is serving the contradictory function of preventing him from listening to anything, either to itself or to the noises in the street.

Between these two extremes, there is a way of listening which has been well described by Susanne Langer.

There is a twilight zone of musical enjoyment when

tonal appreciation is woven into daydreaming. To the

entirely uninitiated hearer it may be an aid in finding expressive forms at all, to extemporise an accompanying romance and let the music express feelings accounted for by its scenes. But to the competent it is a pitfall, because it obscures the full vital import of the music, noting only what comes handy for a purpose, and noting only what expresses attitudes and emotions the listener was familiar with before. It bars everything new and really interesting in a world, since what does not fit the petit roman is passed over, and what does fit is the dreamer's own. Above all it leads attention, not only to the music, but away from it—via the music to something else that is es­sentially an indulgence. One may spend a whole evening in this sort of dream and carry nothing away from it, no musical insight, no new feeling, and actually nothing heard.

(Feeling and Form, Chap. X.)

It is this kind of listening, surely, which is implied by the Duke in Twelfth Night, "If music be the food of love, play on," and by Cleopatra, "Give me some music—music, moody food/Of us that trade in love," and which provoked that great music-lover, Bernard Shaw, to the remark, "Music is the brandy of the damned."

ill

Shakespeare uses instrumental music for two purposes: on socially appropriate occasions, to represent the voice of this world, of collective rejoicing as in a dance, or of mourning as in a dead march and, unexpectedly, as an auditory image of a supernatural or magical world. In the last case the music generally carries the stage direction, "Solemn."

It may be direcdy the voice of Heaven, the music of the spheres heard by Pericles, the music under the earth heard by Antony's soldiers, the music which accompanies Queen Katharine's vision, or it may be commanded, either by spirits of the intermediate world like Oberon or Ariel, or by wise men like Prospero and the physicians in King hear and Peri­cles, to exert a magical influence on human beings. When doctors order music, it is, of course, made by human musi­cians, and to the healthly it may even sound "rough and woeful," but in the ears of the patient, mad Lear or un­conscious Thaisa, it seems a platonic imitation of the unheard celestial music and has a curative effect.

"Solemn" music is generally played off stage. It comes, that is, from an invisible source which makes it impossible for those on stage to express a voluntary reaction to it. Either they cannot hear it or it has effects upon them which they cannot control. Thus, in Act II, Scene i of The Tempest, it is an indication of their villainy, the lack of music in their souls, that Antonio and Sebastian are not affected by the sleeping- spell music when Alonso and the others are, an indication which is forthwith confirmed when they use the opportunity so created to plan Alonso's murder.

On some occasions, e.g., in the vision of Posthumus (Cymheline, Act V, Scene 4), Shakespeare has lines spoken against an instrumental musical background. The effect of this is to depersonalize the speaker, for the sound of the music blots out the individual timbre of his voice. What he says to music seems not his statement but a message, a statement that has to be made.

Antony and Cleopatra (Act IV, Scene 3) is a good example of the dramatic skill with which Shakespeare places a super­natural musical announcement. In the first scene of the act we have had a glimpse of the cold, calculating Octavius refusing Antony's old-fashioned challenge to personal combat and deciding to give battle next day. To Octavius, chivalry is one aspect of a childish lack of self-control and "Poor Antony" is his contemptuous comment on his opponent. Whereupon we are shown Antony talking to his friends in a wrought-up state of self-dramatization and self-pity:

Give me thy hand,

Thou hast been righdy honest; so hast thou;

Thou—and thou-—and thou; you have serv'd me well.

Perchance to-morrow

You'll serve another master. I look on you As one that takes his leave. Mine honest friends, I turn you not away; but like a master Married to your good service, stay till death: Tend me to-night two hours, I ask no more, And the gods yield you for't.

We already know that Enobarbus, who is present, has de­cided to desert Antony. Now follows the scene with the common soldiers in which supernatural music announces that

The god Hercules whom Antony lov'd Now leaves him.

The effect of this is to make us see the human characters, Octavius, Antony, Cleopatra, Enobarbus, as agents of powers greater than they. Their personalities and actions, moral or immoral, carry out the purposes of these powers but cannot change them. Octavius' self-confidence and Antony's sense of doom are justified though they do not know why.

But in the ensuing five scenes it appears that they were both mistaken, for it is Antony who wins the batde. Neither Octavius nor Antony have heard the music, but we, the audi­ence, have, and our knowledge that Antony must lose in the end gives a pathos to his temporary triumph which would be lacking if the invisible music were cut.

Of the instances of mundane or carnal instrumental music in the plays, the most interesting are those in which it is, as it were, the wrong kind of magic. Those who like it and call for it use it to strengthen their illusions about themselves.

So Timon uses it when he gives his great banquet. Music stands for the imaginary world Timon is trying to live in, where everybody loves everybody and he stands at the center as the source of this universal love.

timon: Music, make their welcome!

first lord: You see, my lord, how ample y'are be­loved.

(Timon of Athens, Act I, Scene 2..)

One of his guests is the professional sneerer, Apemantus, whose conceit is that he is the only one who sees the world as it really is, as the absolutely unmusical place where nobody loves anybody but himself. "Nay," says Timon to him, "an you begin to rail on society once, I am swom not to give regard to you. Farewell, and come with better music."

But Timon is never to hear music again after this scene.

Neither Timon nor Apemantus have music in their souls but, while Apemantus is shamelessly proud of this, Timon wants desperately to believe that he has music in his soul, and the discovery that he has not destroys him.

To Falstaff, music, like sack, is an aid to sustaining the illusion of living in an Eden of childlike innocence where nothing serious can happen. Unlike Timon, who does not love others as much as he likes to think, Falstaff himself really is loving. His chief illusion is that Prince Hal loves him as much as he loves Prince Hal and that Prince Hal is an in­nocent child like himself.

Shakespeare reserves the use of a musical background for the scene between Falstaff, Doll, Poinz, and Hal (Henry IV, Part II, Act II, Scene 4). While the music lasts, Time will stand still for Falstaff. He will not grow older, he will not have to pay his debts, Prince Hal will remain his dream-son and boon companion. But the music is interrupted by the realities of time with the arrival of Peto. Hal feels ashamed.

By heaven, Poinz, I feel me much to blame

So idly to profane the present time. . . .

Give me my sword and cloak. Falstaff, good-night!

Falstaff only feels disappointed:

Now comes in the sweetest morsel of the night, and we

must hence, and leave it unpick'd.

In Prince Hal's life this moment is the turning point; from now on he will become the responsible ruler. Falstaff will not change because he is incapable of change but, at this moment, though he is unaware of it, the most important thing in his life, his friendship with Hal, ceases with the words "Good­night." When they meet again, the first words Falstaff will hear are—"I know thee not, old man."

Since music, the virtual image of time, takes actual time to perform, listening to music can be a waste of time, espe­cially for those, like kings, whose primary concern should be with the unheard music of justice.

Ha! Ha! keep time! How sour sweet music is When time is broke and no proportion kept! So is it in the music of men's lives. And here have I the daintiness of ear To check time broke in a disordered string; But, for the concord of my time and state, Had not an ear to hear my true time broke.

CRichard II, Act V, Scene 5.)

iv

We find two kinds of songs in Shakespeare's plays, the called-for and the impromptu, and they serve different dra­matic purposes.

A called-for song is a song which is sung by one character at the request of another who wishes to hear music, so that action and speech are halted until the song is over. Nobody is asked to sing unless it is believed that he can sing well and, litde as we may know about the music which was actually used in performances of Shakespeare, we may safely assume from the contemporary songs which we do possess that they must have made demands which only a good voice and a good musician could satisfy.

On the stage, this means that the character called upon to sing ceases to be himself and becomes a performer; the audi­ence is not interested in him but in the quality of his singing. The songs, it must be remembered, are interludes embedded in a play written in verse or prose which is spoken; they are not arias in an opera where the dramatic medium is itself song, so that we forget that the singers are performers just as we forget that the actor speaking blank verse is an actor.

An Elizabethan theatrical company, giving plays in which such songs occur, would have to engage at least one person for his musical rather than his histrionic talents. If they had not been needed to sing, the dramatic action in Much Ado, As You Like It and Twelfth Night could have got along quite well without Balthazar, Amiens and the Clown.

Yet, minor character though the singer may be, he has a character as a professional musician and, when he gets the chance, Shakespeare draws our attention to it. He notices the mock or polite modesty of the singer who is certain of his talents.

don pedro: Come, Balthazar, we'll hear that song again.

Balthazar: O good my lord, tax not so bad a voice To slander music any more than once.

don pedro: It is the witness still of excellency

To put a strange face on his own perfection.

He marks the annoyance of the professional who must sing for another's pleasure whether he feels like it or not.

jaques: More, I prithee, more.

amiens: My voice is ragged: I know I cannot please you.

jaques: I do not desire you to please me: I desire you to sing. Will you sing?

amiens: More at your request than to please myself.

In the dialogue between Peter and the musicians in Romeo and Juliet, Act IV, Scene IV, he contrasts the lives and motives of ill-paid musicians with that of their rich patrons. The musicians have been hired by the Capulets to play at Juliet's marriage to Paris. Their lives mean nothing to the Capulets; they are things which make music: the lives of the Capulets mean nothing to the musicians; they are things which pay money. The musicians arrive only to learn that Juliet is believed to be dead and the wedding is off. Juliet's life means nothing to them, but her death means a lot; they will not get paid. Whether either the Capulets or the musicians actually like music is left in doubt. Music is something you have to have at a wedding; music is something you have to play if that is your job. With a felicitous irony Shakespeare introduces a quotation from Richard Edwardes' poem, "In Commendation of Musick"

peter: When gripping grief the heart doth wound And doleful dumps the mind oppress Then music with her silver sound— Why "silver sound"¹? Why "music with her

silver sound"? What say you, Simon Catling?

ist mus: Marry, sir, because silver hath a sweet sound.

peter: Pretty! What say you, Hugh Rebeck?

2nd mus: I say, "silver sound," because musicians sound for silver.

CRomeo and Juliet, Act IV, Scene 5.)

The powers the poet attributes to music are exaggerated. It cannot remove the grief of losing a daughter or the pangs of an empty belly.

Since action must cease while a called-for song is heard, such a song, if it is not to be an irrelevant interlude, must be placed at a point where the characters have both a motive for wanting one and leisure to hear it. Consequendy we find few called-for songs in the tragedies, where the steady advance of the hero to his doom must not be interrupted, or in the his­torical plays in which the characters are men of action with no leisure.

Further, it is rare that a character listens to a song for its own sake since, when someone listens to music properly, he forgets himself and others which, on the stage, means that he forgets all about the play. Indeed, I can only think of one case where it seems certain that a character listens to a song as a song should be listened to, instead of as a stimulus to a petit roman of his own, and that is in Henry VIII, Act III, Scene 1, when Katharine listens to Orpheus with his lute. The

Queen knows that the King wants to divorce her and that pressure will be brought upon her to acquiesce. But she be­lieves that it is her religious duty to refuse, whatever the con­sequences. For the moment there is nothing she can do but wait. And her circumstances are too serious and painful to allow her to pass the time daydreaming:

Take thy lute, wench; my soul grows sad with troubles;

Sing and disperse them, if thou canst; leave working.

The words of the song which follows are not about any human feelings, pleasant or unpleasant, which might have some bearing on her situation. The song, like Edwardes' poem, is an encomium musicae. Music cannot, of course, cure grief, as the song claims, but in so far that she is able to attend to it and nothing else, she can forget her situation while the music lasts.

An interesting contrast to this is provided by a scene which at first seems very similar, Act IV, Scene I of Measure for Measure. Here, too, we have an unhappy woman listening to a song. But Mariana, unlike Katharine, is not trying to for­get her unhappiness; she is indulging it. Being the deserted lady has become a role. The words of the song, Take, O take, those lips away, mirrors her situation exactly, and her apology to the Duke when he surprises her gives her away.

I cry you mercy, sir; and well could wish

You had not found me here so musical:

Let me excuse me, and believe me so—

My mirth it much displeas'd, but pleas'd my woe.

In his reply, the Duke, as is fitting in this, the most puritanical of Shakespeare's plays, states the puritanical case against the heard music of this world.

⁵Tis good; though music oft hath such a charm To make bad good, and good provoke to harm.

Were the Duke to extend this reply, one can be sure that he would speak of the unheard music of Justice.

On two occasions Shakespeare shows us music being used with conscious evil intent. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Proteus, who has been false to his friend, forsworn his vows to his girl and is cheating Thurio, serenades Silvia while his for­saken Julia listens. On his side, there is no question here of self-deception through music. Proteus knows exactly what he is doing. Through music which is itself beautiful and good, he hopes to do evil, to seduce Silvia.

Proteus is a weak character, not a wicked one. He is ashamed of what he is doing and, just as he knows the difference be­tween good and evil in conduct, he knows the difference between music well and badly played.

host: How do you, man? the music likes you not?

julia: You mistake; the musician likes me not.

host: Why, my pretty youth?

julia: He plays false, father.

host: How? Out of tune on the strings?

julia: Not so; but yet so false that he grieves my very

heart-strings . . . host: I perceive you delight not in music. julia: Not a whit, when it jars so. host: Hark, what a fine change is in the music! julia: Ay, that change is the spite. host: You would have them always play but one thing?

julia: I would always have one play but one thing.

(Two Gentlemen of Verona, Act IV, Scene

The second occasion is in Cymheline, when Cloten sere­nades Imogen. Cloten is a lost soul without conscience or shame. He is shown, therefore, as someone who does not know one note from another. He has been told that music acts on women as an erotic stimulus, and wishes for the most erotic music that money can buy:

First a very excellent, good, conceited thing; after, a wonderful sweet air, with admirable rich words to it, and then let her consider.

For, except as an erotic stimulus, music is, for him, worthless:

If this penetrate, I will consider your music the better; if it do not, it is a vice in her ears which horse-hairs and calves' guts, nor the voice of the unpaved eunuch to boot can never amend.

(Cymbeline, Act II, Scene 3.) v

The called-for songs in Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It and Twelfth Night illustrate Shakespeare's skill in making what might have been beautiful irrelevancies con­tribute to the dramatic structure.

Much Ado About Nothing Act II, Scene 3.

Song. Sigh no more, ladies. Audience. Don Petro, Claudio, and Benedick (in hiding).

In the two preceding scenes we have learned of two plots, Don Pedro's plot to make Benedick fall in love with Beatrice, and Don John's plot to make Claudio believe that Hero, his wife- to-be, is unchaste. Since this is a comedy, we, the audience, know that all will come right in the end, that Beatrice and Benedick, Don Pedro and Hero will get happily married.

The two plots of which we have just learned, therefore, arouse two different kinds of suspense. If the plot against Benedick succeeds, we are one step nearer the goal; if the plot against Claudio succeeds, we are one step back.

At this point, between their planning and their execution, action is suspended, and we and the characters are made to listen to a song.

The scene opens with Benedick laughing at the thought of the lovesick Claudio and congratulating himself on being heart-whole, and he expresses their contrasted states in musical imagery.

I have known him when there was no music in him, but the drum and the fife; and now had he rather hear

the tabor and the pipe. ... Is it not strange that sheeps' guts should hale souls out of men's bodies?—Well, a horn for my money when all's done.

We, of course, know that Benedick is not as heart-whole as he is trying to pretend. Beatrice and Benedick resist each other because, being both proud and intelligent, they do not wish to be the helpless slaves of emotion or, worse, to become what they have often observed in others, the victims of an imaginary passion. Yet whatever he may say against music, Benedick does not go away, but stays and listens.

Claudio, for his part, wishes to hear music because he is in a dreamy, lovesick state, and one can guess that his petit roman as he listens will be of himself as the ever-faithful swain, so that he will not notice that the mood and words of the song are in complete contrast to his daydream. For the song is actually about the irresponsibility of men and the folly of women taking them seriously, and recommends as an antidote good humor and common sense. If one imagines these senti­ments being the expression of a character, the only character suit is Beatrice.

She is never sad but when she sleeps; and not even sad then; for I have heard my daughter say, she hath often dream'd of happiness and waked herself with laugh­ing. She cannot endure hear tell of a husband. Leonato by no means: she mocks all her wooers out of suit.

I do not think it too far-fetched to imagine that the song arouses in Benedick's mind an image of Beatrice, the tender­ness of which alarms him. The violence of his comment when the song is over is suspicious:

I pray God, his bad voice bode no mischief! I had as lief have heard the night-raven, come what plague could have come after it.

they

And, of course, there is mischief brewing. Almost immediately he overhears the planned conversation of Claudio and Don Pedro, and it has its intended effect. The song may not havecompelled his capitulation, but it has certainly softened him up.

More mischief comes to Claudio who, two scenes later, shows himself all too willing to believe Don John's slander before he has been shown even false evidence, and declares that, if it should prove true, he will shame Hero in public. Had his love for Hero been all he imagined it to be, he would have laughed in Don John's face and believed Hero's assertion of her innocence, despite apparent evidence to the contrary, as immediately as her cousin does. He falls into the trap set for him because as yet he is less a lover than a man in love with love. Hero is as yet more an image in his own mind than a real person, and such images are susceptible to every suggestion.

For Claudio, the song marks the moment when his pleasant illusions about himself as a lover are at their highest. Before he can really listen to music he must be cured of imaginary listening, and the cure lies through the disharmonious experi­ences of passion and guilt.

As You Like It Act II, Scene 5.

Song. Under the Greenwood Tree.

Audience. Jaques.

We have heard of Jaques before, but this is the first time we see him, and now we have been introduced to all the char­acters. We know that, unknown to each other, the three groups—Adam, Orlando; Rosalind, Celia, Touchstone; and the Duke's court—are about to meet. The stage is set for the inter­personal drama to begin.

Of Jaques we have been told that he is a man who is always in a state of critical negation, at odds with the world, ever prompt to strike a discordant note, a man, in fact, with no music in his soul. Yet, when we actually meet him, we find him listening with pleasure to a merry song. No wonder the Duke is surprised when he hears of it:

If he, compact of jars, grows musical, We shall have shortly discord in the spheres.

The first two stanzas of the song are in praise of the pastoral life, an echo of the sentiments expressed earlier hy the Duke:

Hath not old custom made this life more sweet Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods More free from peril than the envious court?

The refrain is a summons, Come Hither, which we know is being answered. But the characters are not gathering here be­cause they wish to, but because they are all exiles and refugees. In praising the Simple Life, the Duke is a bit of a humbug, since he was compelled by force to take to it.

Jaques' extemporary verse which he speaks, not sings, satir­izes the mood of the song.

If it so pass

That any man turn ass, Leaving his wealth and ease, A stubborn will to please, Ducdame, ducdame, ducdam6: Here shall he see Gross fools as he, An if he will come to me.

At the end of the play, however, Jaques is the only character who chooses to leave his wealth and ease—it is the critic of the pastoral sentiment who remains in the cave. But he does not do this his stubborn will to please, for the hint is given that he will go further and embrace the religious life. In Neoplatonic terms he is the most musical of them all for he is the only one whom the carnal music of this world cannot satisfy, because he desires to hear the unheard music of the spheres.

Act II, Scene 7.

Song. Blow, blow, thou winter wind.

Audience. The Court, Orlando, Adam.

Orlando has just shown himself willing to risk his life for his faithful servant, Adam. Adam, old as he is, has given up everything to follow his master. Both were expecting hostility hut have met instead with friendly kindness.

The Duke, confronted with someone who has suffered an injustice similar to his own, drops his pro-pastoral humbug and admits that, for him, exile to the forest of Arden is a suffering.

The song to which they now listen is about suffering, but about the one kind of suffering which none of those present has had to endure, ingratitude from a friend. The behavior of their brothers to the Duke and Orlando has been bad, but it cannot be called ingratitude, since neither Duke Frederick nor Oliver ever feigned friendship with them.

The effect of the song upon them, therefore, is a cheering one. Life may be hard, injustice may seem to triumph in the world, the future may be dark and uncertain, but personal loyalty and generosity exist and make such evils bearable.

twelfth night

I have always found the atmosphere of Twelfth Night a bit whiffy. I get the impression that Shakespeare wrote the play at a time when he was in no mood for comedy, but in a mood of puritanical aversion to all those pleasing illusions which men cherish and by which they lead their lives. The comic convention in which the play is set prevents him from giving direct expression to this mood, but the mood keeps disturbing, even spoiling, the comic feeling. One has a sense, and nowhere more strongly than in the songs, of there being inverted commas around the "fun."

There is a kind of comedy, A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Importance of Being Earnest are good examples, which take place in Eden, the place of pure play where suffer­ing is unknown. In Eden, Love means the "Fancy en­gendered in the eye." The heart has no place there, for it is a world ruled by wish not by will. In A Midsummer Night's Dream it does not really matter who marries whom in the end, provided that the adventures of the lovers form a beautiful pattern; and Titania's fancy for Bottom is not a serious illusion in contrast to reality, but an episode in a dream.

To introduce will and real feeling into Eden turns it into an ugly place, for its native inhabitants cannot tell the difference between play and earnest and in the presence of the ear­nest they appear frivolous in the bad sense. The trouble, to my mind, about Twelfth Night is that Viola and Antonio are strangers to the world which all the other characters inhabit. Viola's love for the Duke and Antonio's love for Sebastian are much too strong and real.

Against their reality, the Duke, who up till the moment of recognition has thought himself in love with Olivia, drops her like a hot potato and falls in love with Viola on the spot, and Sebastian, who accepts Olivia's proposal of marriage within two minutes of meeting her for the first time, appear con­temptible, and it is impossible to believe that either will make a good husband. They give the impression of simply having abandoned one dream for another.

Taken by themselves, the songs in this play are among the most beautiful Shakespeare wrote and, read in an anthology, we hear them as the voice of Eden, as "pure" poetry. But in the contexts in which Shakespeare places them, they sound shocking.

Act II, Scene 3. song: O mistress mine, where are you roaming?

audience : Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek.

Taken playfully, such lines as

What's to come is still unsure:

In delay there lies no plenty;

Then come kiss me, sweet-and-twenty.

Youth's a stuff will not endure

are charming enough, but suppose one asks, "For what kind of person would these lines be an expression of their true feel­ings?" True love certainly does not plead its cause by telling the beloved that love is transitory; and no young man, trying to seduce a girl, would mention her age. He takes her youth and his own for granted. Taken seriously, these lines are the voice of elderly lust, afraid of its own death. Shakespeare forces this awareness on our consciousness by making the audience to the song a couple of seedy old drunks.

Act II, Scene 4. song: Come away, come away, death.

audience: The Duke, Viola, courtiers.

Outside the pastures of Eden, no true lover talks of being slain by a fair, cruel maid, or weeps over his own grave. In real life, such reflections are the daydreams of self-love which is never faithful to others.

Again, Shakespeare has so placed the song as to make it seem an expression of the Duke's real character. Beside him sits the disguised Viola, for whom the Duke is not a playful fancy but a serious passion. It would be painful enough for her if the man she loved really loved another, but it is much worse to be made to see that he only loves himself, and it is this insight which at this point Viola has to endure. In the dialogue about the difference between man's love and woman's which follows on the song, Viola is, I think, being anything but playful when she says:

We men say more, swear more; but, indeed, Our vows are more than will; for still we prove Much in our vows, but little in our love.

vi

The impromptu singer stops speaking and breaks into song, not because anyone else has asked him to sing or is listening, but to relieve his feelings in a way that speech cannot do or to help him in some action. An impromptu song is not art but a form of personal behavior. It reveals, as the called-for song can­not, something about the singer. On the stage, therefore, it is generally desirable that a character who breaks into impromptu song should not have a good voice. No producer, for example, would seek to engage Madame Callas for the part of Ophelia, because the beauty of her voice would distract the audience's attention from the real dramatic point which is that Ophelia's songs are to the highest degree not called-for. We are meant to be horrified both by what she sings and by the fact that she sings at all. The other characters are affected but not in the way that people are affected by music. The King is terrified, Laertes so outraged that he becomes willing to use dirty means to avenge his sister.

Generally, of course, the revelation made by an impromptu song is comic or pathetic rather than shocking. Thus the Gravedigger's song in Hamlet is, firstly, a labor song which helps to make the operation of digging go more smoothly and, secondly, an expression of the galgenhumor which suits his particular mystery.

Singing is one of Autolycus' occupations, so he may be al­lowed a good voice, but When daffodils begin to peer is an impromptu song. He sings as he walks because it makes walk­ing more rhythmical and less tiring, and he sings to keep up his spirits. His is a tough life, with hunger and the gallows never very far away, and he needs all the courage he can muster.

One of the commonest and most deplorable effects of alcohol is its encouragement of the impromptu singer. It is not the least tribute one could pay to Shakespeare when one says that he manages to extract interest from this most trivial and boring of phenomena.

When Silence gets drunk in Shallow's orchard, the maxi­mum pathos is got out of the scene. We know Silence is an old, timid, sad, poor, nice man, and we cannot believe that, even when he was young, he was ever a gay dog; yet, when he is drunk, it is of women, wine, and chivalry that he sings. Further, the drunker he gets, the feebler becomes his memory. The first time he sings, he manages to recall six lines, by the fifth time, he can only remember one:

And Robin Hood, Scarlet, and John.

We are shown, not only the effect of alcohol on the imagina­tion of a timid man, but also its effect on the brain of an old one.

Just as the called-for song can be used with conscious ill- intent, so the impromptu song can be feigned to counterfeit good fellowship.

The characters assembled on Pompey's galley at Misenum who sing Come, thou monarch of the Vine, are anything but pathetic; they are the lords of the world. The occasion is a feast to celebrate a reconciliation, but not one of them trusts the others an inch, and all would betray each other without scruple if it seemed to their advantage.

Pompey has indeed refused Menas' suggestion to murder his guests, but wishes that Menas had done it without telling him. The fact that Lepidus gets stinking and boasts of his power, reveals his inferiority to the others, and it is pretty clear that the Machiavellian Octavius is not quite as tight as he pretends.

Again, when Iago incites Cassio to drink and starts sing­ing

And let the can clink it

we know him to be cold sober, for one cannot imagine any mood of Iago's which he would express by singing. What he sings is pseudo-impromptu. He pretends to be expressing his mood, to be Cassio's buddy, but a buddy is something we know he could never be to anyone.

vii

Ariel's songs in The Tempest cannot be classified as either called-for or impromptu, and this is one reason why the part is so hard to cast. A producer casting Balthazar needs a good pro­fessional singer; for Stephano, a comedian who can make as raucous and unmusical a noise as possible. Neither is too diffi­cult to find. But for Ariel he needs not only a boy with an un­broken voice but also one with a voice far above the standard required for the two pages who are to sing It was a lover and his lass.

For Ariel is neither a singer, that is to say, a human being whose vocal gifts provide him with a social function, nor a nonmusical person who in certain moods feels like singing. Ariel is song; when he is truly himself, he sings. The effect when he speaks is similar to that of recitativo secco in opera, which we listen to because we have to understand the action, though our real interest in the characters is only aroused when they start to sing. Yet Ariel is not an alien visitor from the world of opera who has wandered into a spoken drama by mis­take. He cannot express any human feelings because he has none. The kind of voice he requires is exactly the kind that opera does not want, a voice which is as lacking in the personal and the erotic and as like an instrument as possible.

If Ariel's voice is peculiar, so is the effect that his songs have on others. Ferdinand listens to him in a very different way from that in which the Duke listens to Come away, come away, death, or Mariana to Take, O take those lips away. The effect on them was not to change them but to confirm the mood they were already in. The effect on Ferdinand of Come unto these yellow sands and Full fathom five, is more like the effect of instrumental music on Thaisa: direct, positive, magical.

Suppose Ariel, disguised as a musician, had approached Ferdinand as he sat on a bank, "weeping against the king, my father's wrack," and offered to sing for him; Ferdinand would probably have replied, "Go away, this is no time for music"; he might possibly have asked for something beautiful and sad; he certainly would not have asked for Come unto these yellow sands.

As it is, the song comes to him as an utter surprise, and its effect is not to feed or please his grief, not to encourage him to sit brooding, but to allay his passion, so that he gets to his feet and follows the music. The song opens his present to expecta­tion at a moment when he is in danger of closing it to all but recollection.

The second song is, formally, a dirge, and, since it refers to his father, seems more relevant to Ferdinand's situation than the first. But it has nothing to do with any emotions which a son might feel at his father's grave. As Ferdinand says, "This is no mortal business." It is a magic spell, the effect of which is, not to lessen his feeling of loss, but to change his attitude towards his grief from one of rebellion—"How could this bereavement happen to me?"—to one of awe and reverent ac­ceptance. As long as a man refuses to accept whatever he suffers as given, without pretending he can understand why, the past from which it came into being is an obsession which makes him deny any value to the present. Thanks to the music, Ferdinand is able to accept the past, symbolized by his father, as past, and at once there stands before him his future, Miranda.

The Tempest is full of music of all kinds, yet it is not one of the plays in which, in a symbolic sense, harmony and con­cord finally triumph over dissonant disorder. The three roman­tic comedies which precede it, Pericles, Cymheline, and The Winter's Tale, and which deal with similar themes, injustice, plots, separation, all end in a blaze of joy—the wrongers re­pent, the wronged forgive, the earthly music is a true reflec­tion of the heavenly. The Tempest ends much more sourly. The only wrongdoer who expresses genuine repentance is Alonso; and what a world of difference there is between Cym- beline's "Pardon's the word to all," and Prospero's

For you, most wicked sir, whom to call brother Would even infect my mouth, I do forgive Thy rankest fault—all of them; and require My dukedom of thee, which perforce I know Thou must restore.

Justice has triumphed over injustice, not because it is more harmonious, but because it commands superior force; one might even say because it is louder.

The wedding masque is peculiar and disturbing. Ferdinand and Miranda, who seem as virginal and innocent as any fairy story lovers, are first treated to a moral lecture on the danger of anticipating their marriage vows, and the theme of the masque itself is a plot by Venus to get them to do so. The masque is not allowed to finish, but is broken off suddenly by Prospero, who mutters of another plot, "that foul conspiracy of the beast Caliban and his confederates against my life." As an entertain­ment for a wedding couple, the masque can scarcely be said to have been a success.

Prospero is more like the Duke in Measure for Measure than any other Shakespearian character. The victory of Justice which he brings about seems rather a duty than a source of joy to himself.

I'll bring you to your ship and so to Naples Where I have hope to see the nuptials Of these our dear-beloved solemnis'd And thence retire me to my Milan, where Every third thought shall be my grave.

The tone is not that of a man who, putting behind him the vanities of mundane music, would meditate like Queen Katharine "upon that celestial harmony I go to," but rather of one who longs for a place where silence shall be all.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, England, in 1907. He has been a resident of the United States since 1939 and an American citizen since 1946. Educated at Gresham's School, Holt, and at Christ Church College, Oxford, he be­came associated with a small group of young writers in London —among them Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood— who became recognized as the most promising of the new generation in English letters. He collaborated with Isherwood on the plays of The Dog Beneath the Skin, The Ascent of F-6 and On the Frontier, as well as on Journey to a War, a prose record of experience in China. He has edited many anthologies including The Oxford Book of Light Verse and, with Norman Holmes Pearson, Poets of the English Language. In collabora­tion with Chester Kallman he has also written the libretto for Igor Stravinsky's opera, The Rake's Progress and Hans Henze's opera, Elegy for Young Lovers.

Mr. Auden is the author of several volumes of poetry, in­cluding The Double Man, For the Time Being, The Age of Anxiety, Nones, and The Shield of Achilles, which received the National Book Award in 1956. That same year he was elected professor of poetry at Oxford University. His Selected Poetry appears in the Modern Library. His most recent col­lection of poems is Homage to Clio, published in i960.

[1] Ebenezer Elliott, quoted by Aldous Huxley in Texts and Pretexts.

[2] AH the women I have met who drank heavily were lighter and thinner than average.