_3_
THE THEATRE
During carnival a company is playing in the theatre. On Christmas Day
the padrone came in with the key of his box, and would we care to see
the drama? The theatre was small, a mere nothing, in fact; a mere affair
of peasants, you understand; and the Signor Di Paoli spread his hands
and put his head on one side, parrot-wise; but we might find a little
diversion--_un peu de divertiment_. With this he handed me the key.
I made suitable acknowledgements, and was really impressed. To be handed
the key of a box at the theatre, so simply and pleasantly, in the large
sitting-room looking over the grey lake of Christmas Day; it seemed to
me a very graceful event. The key had a chain and a little shield of
bronze, on which was beaten out a large figure 8.
So the next day we went to see _I Spettri_, expecting some good, crude
melodrama. The theatre is an old church. Since that triumph of the deaf
and dumb, the cinematograph, has come to give us the nervous excitement
of speed--grimace agitation, and speed, as of flying atoms, chaos--many
an old church in Italy has taken a new lease of life.
This cast-off church made a good theatre. I realized how cleverly it had
been constructed for the dramatic presentation of religious ceremonies.
The east end is round, the walls are windowless, sound is well
distributed. Now everything is theatrical, except the stone floor and
two pillars at the back of the auditorium, and the slightly
ecclesiastical seats below.
There are two tiers of little boxes in the theatre, some forty in all,
with fringe and red velvet, and lined with dark red paper, quite like
real boxes in a real theatre. And the padrone's is one of the best. It
just holds three people.
We paid our threepence entrance fee in the stone hall and went upstairs.
I opened the door of Number 8, and we were shut in our little cabin,
looking down on the world. Then I found the barber, Luigi, bowing
profusely in a box opposite. It was necessary to make bows all round:
ah, the chemist, on the upper tier, near the barber; how-do-you-do to
the padrona of the hotel, who is our good friend, and who sits, wearing
a little beaver shoulder-cape, a few boxes off; very cold salutation to
the stout village magistrate with the long brown beard, who leans
forward in the box facing the stage, while a grouping of faces look out
from behind him; a warm smile to the family of the Signora Gemma, across
next to the stage. Then we are settled.
I cannot tell why I hate the village magistrate. He looks like a family
portrait by a Flemish artist, he himself weighing down the front of the
picture with his portliness and his long brown beard, whilst the faces
of his family are arranged in two groups for the background. I think he
is angry at our intrusion. He is very republican and self-important. But
we eclipse him easily, with the aid of a large black velvet hat, and
black furs, and our Sunday clothes.
Downstairs the villagers are crowding, drifting like a heavy current.
The women are seated, by church instinct, all together on the left, with
perhaps an odd man at the end of a row, beside his wife. On the right,
sprawling in the benches, are several groups of bersaglieri, in grey
uniforms and slanting cock's-feather hats; then peasants, fishermen, and
an odd couple or so of brazen girls taking their places on the
men's side.
At the back, lounging against the pillars or standing very dark and
sombre, are the more reckless spirits of the village. Their black felt
hats are pulled down, their cloaks are thrown over their mouths, they
stand very dark and isolated in their moments of stillness, they shout
and wave to each other when anything occurs.
The men are clean, their clothes are all clean washed. The rags of the
poorest porter are always well washed. But it is Sunday tomorrow, and
they are shaved only on a Sunday. So that they have a week's black
growth on their chins. But they have dark, soft eyes, unconscious and
vulnerable. They move and balance with loose, heedless motion upon their
clattering zoccoli, they lounge with wonderful ease against the wall at
the back, or against the two pillars, unconscious of the patches on
their clothes or of their bare throats, that are knotted perhaps with a
scarlet rag. Loose and abandoned, they lounge and talk, or they watch
with wistful absorption the play that is going on.
They are strangely isolated in their own atmosphere, and as if revealed.
It is as if their vulnerable being was exposed and they have not the wit
to cover it. There is a pathos of physical sensibility and mental
inadequacy. Their mind is not sufficiently alert to run with their
quick, warm senses.
The men keep together, as if to support each other, the women also are
together; in a hard, strong herd. It is as if the power, the hardness,
the triumph, even in this Italian village, were with the women in their
relentless, vindictive unity.
That which drives men and women together, the indomitable necessity, is
like a bondage upon the people. They submit as under compulsion, under
constraint. They come together mostly in anger and in violence of
destructive passion. There is no comradeship between men and women, none
whatsoever, but rather a condition of battle, reserve, hostility.
On Sundays the uncomfortable, excited, unwilling youth walks for an hour
with his sweetheart, at a little distance from her, on the public
highway in the afternoon. This is a concession to the necessity for
marriage. There is no real courting, no happiness of being together,
only the roused excitement which is based on a fundamental hostility.
There is very little flirting, and what there is is of the subtle, cruel
kind, like a sex duel. On the whole, the men and women avoid each other,
almost shun each other. Husband and wife are brought together in a
child, which they both worship. But in each of them there is only the
great reverence for the infant, and the reverence for fatherhood or
motherhood, as the case may be; there is no spiritual love.
In marriage, husband and wife wage the subtle, satisfying war of sex
upon each other. It gives a profound satisfaction, a profound intimacy.
But it destroys all joy, all unanimity in action.
On Sunday afternoons the uncomfortable youth walks by the side of his
maiden for an hour in the public highway. Then he escapes; as from a
bondage he goes back to his men companions. On Sunday afternoons and
evenings the married woman, accompanied by a friend or by a child--she
dare not go alone, afraid of the strange, terrible sex-war between her
and the drunken man--is seen leading home the wine-drunken, liberated
husband. Sometimes she is beaten when she gets home. It is part of the
process. But there is no synthetic love between men and women, there is
only passion, and passion is fundamental hatred, the act of love is
a fight.
The child, the outcome, is divine. Here the union, the oneness, is
manifest. Though spirit strove with spirit, in mortal conflict, during
the sex-passion, yet the flesh united with flesh in oneness. The phallus
is still divine. But the spirit, the mind of man, this has
become nothing.
So the women triumph. They sit down below in the theatre, their
perfectly dressed hair gleaming, their backs very straight, their heads
carried tensely. They are not very noticeable. They seem held in
reserve. They are just as tense and stiff as the men are slack and
abandoned. Some strange will holds the women taut. They seem like
weapons, dangerous. There is nothing charming nor winning about them; at
the best a full, prolific maternity, at the worst a yellow poisonous
bitterness of the flesh that is like a narcotic. But they are too strong
for the men. The male spirit, which would subdue the immediate flesh to
some conscious or social purpose, is overthrown. The woman in her
maternity is the law-giver, the supreme authority. The authority of the
man, in work, in public affairs, is something trivial in comparison. The
pathetic ignominy of the village male is complete on Sunday afternoon,
on his great day of liberation, when he is accompanied home, drunk but
sinister, by the erect, unswerving, slightly cowed woman. His drunken
terrorizing is only pitiable, she is so obviously the more
constant power.
And this is why the men must go away to America. It is not the money. It
is the profound desire to rehabilitate themselves, to recover some
dignity as men, as producers, as workers, as creators from the spirit,
not only from the flesh. It is a profound desire to get away from women
altogether, the terrible subjugation to sex, the phallic worship.
The company of actors in the little theatre was from a small town away
on the plain, beyond Brescia. The curtain rose, everybody was still,
with that profound, naïve attention which children give. And after a few
minutes I realized that _I Spettri_ was Ibsen's _Ghosts_. The peasants
and fishermen of the Garda, even the rows of ungovernable children, sat
absorbed in watching as the Norwegian drama unfolded itself.
The actors are peasants. The leader is the son of a peasant proprietor.
He is qualified as a chemist, but is unsettled, vagrant, prefers
play-acting. The Signer Pietro di Paoli shrugs his shoulders and
apologizes for their vulgar accent. It is all the same to me. I am
trying to get myself to rights with the play, which I have just lately
seen in Munich, perfectly produced and detestable.
It was such a change from the hard, ethical, slightly mechanized
characters in the German play, which was as perfect an interpretation as
I can imagine, to the rather pathetic notion of the Italian peasants,
that I had to wait to adjust myself.
The mother was a pleasant, comfortable woman harassed by something, she
did not quite know what. The pastor was a ginger-haired caricature
imitated from the northern stage, quite a lay figure. The peasants never
laughed, they watched solemnly and absorbedly like children. The servant
was just a slim, pert, forward hussy, much too flagrant. And then the
son, the actor-manager: he was a dark, ruddy man, broad and thick-set,
evidently of peasant origin, but with some education now; he was the
important figure, the play was his.
And he was strangely disturbing. Dark, ruddy, and powerful, he could not
be the blighted son of 'Ghosts', the hectic, unsound, northern issue of
a diseased father. His flashy Italian passion for his half-sister was
real enough to make one uncomfortable: something he wanted and would
have in spite of his own soul, something which fundamentally he did
not want.
It was this contradiction within the man that made the play so
interesting. A robust, vigorous man of thirty-eight, flaunting and
florid as a rather successful Italian can be, there was yet a secret
sickness which oppressed him. But it was no taint in the blood, it was
rather a kind of debility in the soul. That which he wanted and would
have, the sensual excitement, in his soul he did not want it, no, not at
all. And yet he must act from his physical desires, his physical will.
His true being, his real self, was impotent. In his soul he was
dependent, forlorn. He was childish and dependent on the mother. To hear
him say, '_Grazia, mamma!_' would have tormented the mother-soul in any
woman living. Such a child crying in the night! And for what?
For he was hot-blooded, healthy, almost in his prime, and free as a man
can be in his circumstances. He had his own way, he admitted no
thwarting. He governed his circumstances pretty much, coming to our
village with his little company, playing the plays he chose himself. And
yet, that which he would have he did not vitally want, it was only a
sort of inflamed obstinacy that made him so insistent, in the masculine
way. He was not going to be governed by women, he was not going to be
dictated to in the least by any one. And this because he was beaten by
his own flesh.
His real man's soul, the soul that goes forth and builds up a new world
out of the void, was ineffectual. It could only revert to the senses.
His divinity was the phallic divinity. The other male divinity, which is
the spirit that fulfils in the world the new germ of an idea, this was
denied and obscured in him, unused. And it was this spirit which cried
out helplessly in him through the insistent, inflammable flesh. Even
this play-acting was a form of physical gratification for him, it had in
it neither real mind nor spirit.
It was so different from Ibsen, and so much more moving. Ibsen is
exciting, nervously sensational. But this was really moving, a real
crying in the night. One loved the Italian nation, and wanted to help it
with all one's soul. But when one sees the perfect Ibsen, how one hates
the Norwegian and Swedish nations! They are detestable.
They seem to be fingering with the mind the secret places and sources of
the blood, impertinent, irreverent, nasty. There is a certain
intolerable nastiness about the real Ibsen: the same thing is in
Strindberg and in most of the Norwegian and Swedish writings. It is with
them a sort of phallic worship also, but now the worship is mental and
perverted: the phallus is the real fetish, but it is the source of
uncleanliness and corruption and death, it is the Moloch, worshipped in
obscenity.
Which is unbearable. The phallus is a symbol of creative divinity. But
it represents only part of creative divinity. The Italian has made it
represent the whole. Which is now his misery, for he has to destroy his
symbol in himself.
Which is why the Italian men have the enthusiasm for war, unashamed.
Partly it is the true phallic worship, for the phallic principle is to
absorb and dominate all life. But also it is a desire to expose
themselves to death, to know death, that death may destroy in them this
too strong dominion of the blood, may once more liberate the spirit of
outgoing, of uniting, of making order out of chaos, in the outer world,
as the flesh makes a new order from chaos in begetting a new life, set
them free to know and serve a greater idea.
The peasants below sat and listened intently, like children who hear and
do not understand, yet who are spellbound. The children themselves sit
spellbound on the benches till the play is over. They do not fidget or
lose interest. They watch with wide, absorbed eyes at the mystery, held
in thrall by the sound of emotion.
But the villagers do not really care for Ibsen. They let it go. On the
feast of Epiphany, as a special treat, was given a poetic drama by
D'Annunzio, _La Fiaccola sotto il Moggio_--_The Light under the Bushel_.
It is a foolish romantic play of no real significance. There are several
murders and a good deal of artificial horror. But it is all a very nice
and romantic piece of make-believe, like a charade.
So the audience loved it. After the performance of _Ghosts_ I saw the
barber, and he had the curious grey clayey look of an Italian who is
cold and depressed. The sterile cold inertia, which the so-called
passionate nations know so well, had settled on him, and he went
obliterating himself in the street, as if he were cold, dead.
But after the D'Annunzio play he was like a man who has drunk sweet wine
and is warm.
'_Ah, bellissimo, bellissimo_!' he said, in tones of intoxicated
reverence, when he saw me.
'Better than _I Spettri_?' I said.
He half-raised his hands, as if to imply the fatuity of the question.
'Ah, but--' he said, 'it was D'Annunzio. The other....'
'That was Ibsen--a great Norwegian,' I said, 'famous all over the
world.'
'But you know--D'Annunzio is a poet--oh, beautiful, beautiful!' There
was no going beyond this '_bello--bellissimo_'.
It was the language which did it. It was the Italian passion for
rhetoric, for the speech which appeals to the senses and makes no demand
on the mind. When an Englishman listens to a speech he wants at least to
imagine that he understands thoroughly and impersonally what is meant.
But an Italian only cares about the emotion. It is the movement, the
physical effect of the language upon the blood which gives him supreme
satisfaction. His mind is scarcely engaged at all. He is like a child,
hearing and feeling without understanding. It is the sensuous
gratification he asks for. Which is why D'Annunzio is a god in Italy. He
can control the current of the blood with his words, and although much
of what he says is bosh, yet his hearer is satisfied, fulfilled.
Carnival ends on the 5th of February, so each Thursday there is a Serata
d' Onore of one of the actors. The first, and the only one for which
prices were raised--to a fourpence entrance fee instead of
threepence--was for the leading lady. The play was _The Wife of the
Doctor_, a modern piece, sufficiently uninteresting; the farce that
followed made me laugh.
Since it was her Evening of Honour, Adelaida was the person to see. She
is very popular, though she is no longer young. In fact, she is the
mother of the young pert person of _Ghosts_.
Nevertheless, Adelaida, stout and blonde and soft and pathetic, is the
real heroine of the theatre, the prima. She is very good at sobbing; and
afterwards the men exclaim involuntarily, out of their strong emotion,
'_bella, bella_!' The women say nothing. They sit stiffly and
dangerously as ever. But, no doubt, they quite agree this is the true
picture of ill-used, tear-stained woman, the bearer of many wrongs.
Therefore they take unto themselves the homage of the men's '_bella,
bella_!' that follows the sobs: it is due recognition of their hard
wrongs: 'the woman pays.' Nevertheless, they despise in their souls the
plump, soft Adelaida.
Dear Adelaida, she is irreproachable. In every age, in every clime, she
is dear, at any rate to the masculine soul, this soft, tear-blenched,
blonde, ill-used thing. She must be ill-used and unfortunate. Dear
Gretchen, dear Desdemona, dear Iphigenia, dear Dame aux Camélias, dear
Lucy of Lammermoor, dear Mary Magdalene, dear, pathetic, unfortunate
soul, in all ages and lands, how we love you. In the theatre she
blossoms forth, she is the lily of the stage. Young and inexperienced as
I am, I have broken my heart over her several times. I could write a
sonnet-sequence to her, yes, the fair, pale, tear-stained thing,
white-robed, with her hair down her back; I could call her by a hundred
names, in a hundred languages, Melisande, Elizabeth, Juliet, Butterfly,
Phèdre, Minnehaha, etc. Each new time I hear her voice, with its faint
clang of tears, my heart grows big and hot, and my bones melt. I detest
her, but it is no good. My heart begins to swell like a bud under the
plangent rain.
The last time I saw her was here, on the Garda, at Salò. She was the
chalked, thin-armed daughter of Rigoletto. I detested her, her voice had
a chalky squeak in it. And yet, by the end, my heart was overripe in my
breast, ready to burst with loving affection. I was ready to walk on to
the stage, to wipe out the odious, miscreant lover, and to offer her all
myself, saying, 'I can see it is real _love_ you want, and you shall
have it: _I_ will give it to you.'
Of course I know the secret of the Gretchen magic; it is all in the
'Save me, Mr Hercules!' phrase. Her shyness, her timidity, her
trustfulness, her tears foster my own strength and grandeur. I am the
positive half of the universe. But so I am, if it comes to that, just as
positive as the other half.
Adelaida is plump, and her voice has just that moist, plangent strength
which gives one a real voluptuous thrill. The moment she comes on the
stage and looks round--a bit scared--she is _she_, Electra, Isolde,
Sieglinde, Marguèrite. She wears a dress of black voile, like the lady
who weeps at the trial in the police-court. This is her modern uniform.
Her antique garment is of trailing white, with a blonde pigtail and a
flower. Realistically, it is black voile and a handkerchief.
Adelaida always has a handkerchief. And still I cannot resist it. I say,
'There's the hanky!' Nevertheless, in two minutes it has worked its way
with me. She squeezes it in her poor, plump hand as the tears begin to
rise; Fate, or man, is inexorable, so cruel. There is a sob, a cry; she
presses the fist and the hanky to her eyes, one eye, then the other. She
weeps real tears, tears shaken from the depths of her soft, vulnerable,
victimized female self. I cannot stand it. There I sit in the padrone's
little red box and stifle my emotion, whilst I repeat in my heart: 'What
a shame, child, what a shame!' She is twice my age, but what is age in
such circumstances? 'Your poor little hanky, it's sopping. There, then,
don't cry. It'll be all right. _I'll_ see you're all right. _All_ men
are not beasts, you know.' So I cover her protectively in my arms, and
soon I shall be kissing her, for comfort, in the heat and prowess of my
compassion, kissing her soft, plump cheek and neck closely, bringing my
comfort nearer and nearer.
It is a pleasant and exciting role for me to play. Robert Burns did the
part to perfection:
O wert thou in the cauld blast
On yonder lea, on yonder lea.
How many times does one recite that to all the Ophelias and Gretchens in
the world:
Thy bield should be my bosom.
How one admires one's bosom in that capacity! Looking down at one's
shirt-front, one is filled with strength and pride.
Why are the women so bad at playing this part in real life, this
Ophelia-Gretchen role? Why are they so unwilling to go mad and die for
our sakes? They do it regularly on the stage.
But perhaps, after all, we write the plays. What a villain I am, what a
black-browed, passionate, ruthless, masculine villain I am to the
leading lady on the stage; and, on the other hand, dear heart, what a
hero, what a fount of chivalrous generosity and faith! I am _anything_
but a dull and law-abiding citizen. I am a Galahad, full of purity and
spirituality, I am the Lancelot of valour and lust; I fold my hands, or
I cock my hat in one side, as the case may be: I am _myself_. Only, I am
not a respectable citizen, not that, in this hour of my glory and
my escape.
Dear Heaven, how Adelaida wept, her voice plashing like violin music, at
my ruthless, masculine cruelty. Dear heart, how she sighed to rest on my
sheltering bosom! And how I enjoyed my dual nature! How I
admired myself!
Adelaida chose _La Moglie del Dottore_ for her Evening of Honour. During
the following week came a little storm of coloured bills: 'Great Evening
of Honour of Enrico Persevalli.'
This is the leader, the actor-manager. What should he choose for his
great occasion, this broad, thick-set, ruddy descendant of the peasant
proprietors of the plain? No one knew. The title of the play was
not revealed.
So we were staying at home, it was cold and wet. But the maestra came
inflammably on that Thursday evening, and were we not going to the
theatre, to see _Amleto_?
Poor maestra, she is yellow and bitter-skinned, near fifty, but her dark
eyes are still corrosively inflammable. She was engaged to a lieutenant
in the cavalry, who got drowned when she was twenty-one. Since then she
has hung on the tree unripe, growing yellow and bitter-skinned, never
developing.
'_Amleto!_' I say. '_Non lo conosco._'
A certain fear comes into her eyes. She is schoolmistress, and has a
mortal dread of being wrong.
'_Si_,' she cries, wavering, appealing, '_una dramma inglese_.'
'English!' I repeated.
'Yes, an English drama.'
'How do you write it?'
Anxiously, she gets a pencil from her reticule, and, with black-gloved
scrupulousness, writes _Amleto_.
'_Hamlet_!' I exclaim wonderingly.
'_Ecco, Amleto!_' cries the maestra, her eyes aflame with thankful
justification.
Then I knew that Signore Enrico Persevalli was looking to me for an
audience. His Evening of Honour would be a bitter occasion to him if the
English were not there to see his performance.
I hurried to get ready, I ran through the rain. I knew he would take it
badly that it rained on his Evening of Honour. He counted himself a man
who had fate against him.
'_Sono un disgraziato, io._'
I was late. The First Act was nearly over. The play was not yet alive,
neither in the bosoms of the actors nor in the audience. I closed the
door of the box softly, and came forward. The rolling Italian eyes of
Hamlet glanced up at me. There came a new impulse over the Court
of Denmark.
Enrico looked a sad fool in his melancholy black. The doublet sat close,
making him stout and vulgar, the knee-breeches seemed to exaggerate the
commonness of his thick, rather short, strutting legs. And he carried a
long black rag, as a cloak, for histrionic purposes. And he had on his
face a portentous grimace of melancholy and philosophic importance. His
was the caricature of Hamlet's melancholy self-absorption.
I stooped to arrange my footstool and compose my countenance. I was
trying not to grin. For the first time, attired in philosophic
melancholy of black silk, Enrico looked a boor and a fool. His
close-cropped, rather animal head was common above the effeminate
doublet, his sturdy, ordinary figure looked absurd in a
melancholic droop.
All the actors alike were out of their element. Their Majesties of
Denmark were touching. The Queen, burly little peasant woman, was ill at
ease in her pink satin. Enrico had had no mercy. He knew she loved to be
the scolding servant or housekeeper, with her head tied up in a
handkerchief, shrill and vulgar. Yet here she was pranked out in an
expanse of satin, la Regina. Regina, indeed!
She obediently did her best to be important. Indeed, she rather fancied
herself; she looked sideways at the audience, self-consciously, quite
ready to be accepted as an imposing and noble person, if they would
esteem her such. Her voice sounded hoarse and common, but whether it was
the pink satin in contrast, or a cold, I do not know. She was almost
childishly afraid to move. Before she began a speech she looked down and
kicked her skirt viciously, so that she was sure it was under control.
Then she let go. She was a burly, downright little body of sixty, one
rather expected her to box Hamlet on the ears.
Only she liked being a queen when she sat on the throne. There she
perched with great satisfaction, her train splendidly displayed down the
steps. She was as proud as a child, and she looked like Queen Victoria
of the Jubilee period.
The King, her noble consort, also had new honours thrust upon him, as
well as new garments. His body was real enough but it had nothing at all
to do with his clothes. They established a separate identity by
themselves. But wherever he went, they went with him, to the confusion
of everybody.
He was a thin, rather frail-looking peasant, pathetic, and very gentle.
There was something pure and fine about him, he was so exceedingly
gentle and by natural breeding courteous. But he did not feel kingly, he
acted the part with beautiful, simple resignation.
Enrico Persevalli had overshot himself in every direction, but worst of
all in his own. He had become a hulking fellow, crawling about with his
head ducked between his shoulders, pecking and poking, creeping about
after other people, sniffing at them, setting traps for them, absorbed
by his own self-important self-consciousness. His legs, in their black
knee-breeches, had a crawling, slinking look; he always carried the
black rag of a cloak, something for him to twist about as he twisted in
his own soul, overwhelmed by a sort of inverted perversity.
I had always felt an aversion from Hamlet: a creeping, unclean thing he
seems, on the stage, whether he is Forbes Robertson or anybody else. His
nasty poking and sniffing at his mother, his setting traps for the King,
his conceited perversion with Ophelia make him always intolerable. The
character is repulsive in its conception, based on self-dislike and a
spirit of disintegration.
There is, I think, this strain of cold dislike, or self-dislike, through
much of the Renaissance art, and through all the later Shakespeare. In
Shakespeare it is a kind of corruption in the flesh and a conscious
revolt from this. A sense of corruption in the flesh makes Hamlet
frenzied, for he will never admit that it is his own flesh. Leonardo da
Vinci is the same, but Leonardo loves the corruption maliciously.
Michelangelo rejects any feeling of corruption, he stands by the flesh,
the flesh only. It is the corresponding reaction, but in the opposite
direction. But that is all four hundred years ago. Enrico Persevalli has
just reached the position. He _is_ Hamlet, and evidently he has great
satisfaction in the part. He is the modern Italian, suspicious,
isolated, self-nauseated, labouring in a sense of physical corruption.
But he will not admit it is in himself. He creeps about in self-conceit,
transforming his own self-loathing. With what satisfaction did he reveal
corruption--corruption in his neighbours he gloated in--letting his
mother know he had discovered her incest, her uncleanness, gloated in
torturing the incestuous King. Of all the unclean ones, Hamlet was the
uncleanest. But he accused only the others.
Except in the 'great' speeches, and there Enrico was betrayed, Hamlet
suffered the extremity of physical self-loathing, loathing of his own
flesh. The play is the statement of the most significant philosophic
position of the Renaissance. Hamlet is far more even than Orestes, his
prototype, a mental creature, anti-physical, anti-sensual. The whole
drama is the tragedy of the convulsed reaction of the mind from the
flesh, of the spirit from the self, the reaction from the great
aristocratic to the great democratic principle.
An ordinary instinctive man, in Hamlet's position, would either have set
about murdering his uncle, by reflex action, or else would have gone
right away. There would have been no need for Hamlet to murder his
mother. It would have been sufficient blood-vengeance if he had killed
his uncle. But that is the statement according to the aristocratic
principle.
Orestes was in the same position, but the same position two thousand
years earlier, with two thousand years of experience wanting. So that
the question was not so intricate in him as in Hamlet, he was not nearly
so conscious. The whole Greek life was based on the idea of the
supremacy of the self, and the self was always male. Orestes was his
father's child, he would be the same whatever mother he had. The mother
was but the vehicle, the soil in which the paternal seed was planted.
When Clytemnestra murdered Agamemnon, it was as if a common individual
murdered God, to the Greek.
But Agamemnon, King and Lord, was not infallible. He was fallible. He
had sacrificed Iphigenia for the sake of glory in war, for the
fulfilment of the superb idea of self, but on the other hand he had made
cruel dissension for the sake of the concubines captured in war. The
paternal flesh was fallible, ungodlike. It lusted after meaner pursuits
than glory, war, and slaying, it was not faithful to the highest idea of
the self. Orestes was driven mad by the furies of his mother, because of
the justice that they represented. Nevertheless he was in the end
exculpated. The third play of the trilogy is almost foolish, with its
prating gods. But it means that, according to the Greek conviction,
Orestes was right and Clytemnestra entirely wrong. But for all that, the
infallible King, the infallible male Self, is dead in Orestes, killed by
the furies of Clytemnestra. He gains his peace of mind after the
revulsion from his own physical fallibility, but he will never be an
unquestioned lord, as Agamemnon was. Orestes is left at peace,
neutralized. He is the beginning of non-aristocratic Christianity.
Hamlet's father, the King, is, like Agamemnon, a warrior-king. But,
unlike Agamemnon, he is blameless with regard to Gertrude. Yet Gertrude,
like Clytemnestra, is the potential murderer of her husband, as Lady
Macbeth is murderess, as the daughters of Lear. The women murder the
supreme male, the ideal Self, the King and Father.
This is the tragic position Shakespeare must dwell upon. The woman
rejects, repudiates the ideal Self which the male represents to her. The
supreme representative, King and Father, is murdered by the Wife and the
Daughters.
What is the reason? Hamlet goes mad in a revulsion of rage and nausea.
Yet the women-murderers only represent some ultimate judgement in his
own soul. At the bottom of his own soul Hamlet has decided that the Self
in its supremacy, Father and King, must die. It is a suicidal decision
for his involuntary soul to have arrived at. Yet it is inevitable. The
great religious, philosophic tide, which has been swelling all through
the Middle Ages, had brought him there.
The question, to be or not to be, which Hamlet puts himself, does not
mean, to live or not to live. It is not the simple human being who puts
himself the question, it is the supreme I, King and Father. To be or not
to be King, Father, in the Self supreme? And the decision is, not to be.
It is the inevitable philosophic conclusion of all the Renaissance. The
deepest impulse in man, the religious impulse, is the desire to be
immortal, or infinite, consummated. And this impulse is satisfied in
fulfilment of an idea, a steady progression. In this progression man is
satisfied, he seems to have reached his goal, this infinity, this
immortality, this eternal being, with every step nearer which he takes.
And so, according to his idea of fulfilment, man establishes the whole
order of life. If my fulfilment is the fulfilment and establishment of
the unknown divine Self which I am, then I shall proceed in the
realizing of the greatest idea of the self, the highest conception of
the I, my order of life will be kingly, imperial, aristocratic. The body
politic also will culminate in this divinity of the flesh, this body
imbued with glory, invested with divine power and might, the King, the
Emperor. In the body politic also I shall desire a king, an emperor, a
tyrant, glorious, mighty, in whom I see myself consummated and
fulfilled. This is inevitable!
But during the Middle Ages, struggling within this pagan, original
transport, the transport of the Ego, was a small dissatisfaction, a
small contrary desire. Amid the pomp of kings and popes was the Child
Jesus and the Madonna. Jesus the King gradually dwindled down. There was
Jesus the Child, helpless, at the mercy of all the world. And there was
Jesus crucified.
The old transport, the old fulfilment of the Ego, the Davidian ecstasy,
the assuming of all power and glory unto the self, the becoming infinite
through the absorption of all into the Ego, this gradually became
unsatisfactory. This was not the infinite, this was not immortality.
This was eternal death, this was damnation.
The monk rose up with his opposite ecstasy, the Christian ecstasy. There
was a death to die: the flesh, the self, must die, so that the spirit
should rise again immortal, eternal, infinite. I am dead unto myself,
but I live in the Infinite. The finite Me is no more, only the Infinite,
the Eternal, is.
At the Renaissance this great half-truth overcame the other great
half-truth. The Christian Infinite, reached by a process of abnegation,
a process of being absorbed, dissolved, diffused into the great
Not-Self, supplanted the old pagan Infinite, wherein the self like a
root threw out branches and radicles which embraced the whole universe,
became the Whole.
There is only one Infinite, the world now cried, there is the great
Christian Infinite of renunciation and consummation in the not-self. The
other, that old pride, is damnation. The sin of sins is Pride, it is the
way to total damnation. Whereas the pagans based their life on pride.
And according to this new Infinite, reached through renunciation and
dissolving into the Others, the Neighbour, man must build up his actual
form of life. With Savonarola and Martin Luther the living Church
actually transformed itself, for the Roman Church was still pagan. Henry
VIII simply said: 'There is no Church, there is only the State.' But
with Shakespeare the transformation had reached the State also. The
King, the Father, the representative of the Consummate Self, the maximum
of all life, the symbol of the consummate being, the becoming Supreme,
Godlike, Infinite, he must perish and pass away. This Infinite was not
infinite, this consummation was not consummated, all this was fallible,
false. It was rotten, corrupt. It must go. But Shakespeare was also the
thing itself. Hence his horror, his frenzy, his self-loathing.
The King, the Emperor is killed in the soul of man, the old order of
life is over, the old tree is dead at the root. So said Shakespeare. It
was finally enacted in Cromwell. Charles I took up the old position of
kingship by divine right. Like Hamlet's father, he was blameless
otherwise. But as representative of the old form of life, which mankind
now hated with frenzy, he must be cut down, removed. It was a
symbolic act.
The world, our world of Europe, had now really turned, swung round to a
new goal, a new idea, the Infinite reached through the omission of Self.
God is all that which is Not-Me. I am consummate when my Self, the
resistant solid, is reduced and diffused into all that which is Not-Me:
my neighbour, my enemy, the great Otherness. Then I am perfect.
And from this belief the world began gradually to form a new State, a
new body politic, in which the Self should be removed. There should be
no king, no lords, no aristocrats. The world continued in its religious
belief, beyond the French Revolution, beyond the great movement of
Shelley and Godwin. There should be no Self. That which was supreme was
that which was Not-Me, the other. The governing factor in the State was
the idea of the good of others; that is, the Common Good. And the
_vital_ governing idea in the State has been this idea since Cromwell.
Before Cromwell the idea was 'For the King', because every man saw
himself consummated in the King. After Cromwell the idea was 'For the
good of my neighbour', or 'For the good of the people', or 'For the good
of the whole'. This has been our ruling idea, by which we have more or
less lived.
Now this has failed. Now we say that the Christian Infinite is not
infinite. We are tempted, like Nietzsche, to return back to the old
pagan Infinite, to say that is supreme. Or we are inclined, like the
English and the Pragmatist, to say, 'There is no Infinite, there is no
Absolute. The only Absolute is expediency, the only reality is sensation
and momentariness.' But we may say this, even act on it, _à la Sanine_.
But we never believe it.
What is really Absolute is the mystic Reason which connects both
Infinites, the Holy Ghost that relates both natures of God. If we now
wish to make a living State, we must build it up to the idea of the Holy
Spirit, the supreme Relationship. We must say, the pagan Infinite is
infinite, the Christian Infinite is infinite: these are our two
Consummations, in both of these we are consummated. But that which
relates them alone is absolute.
This Absolute of the Holy Ghost we may call Truth or Justice or Right.
These are partial names, indefinite and unsatisfactory unless there be
kept the knowledge of the two Infinites, pagan and Christian, which they
go between. When both are there, they are like a superb bridge, on which
one can stand and know the whole world, my world, the two halves of
the universe.
