DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS
King George, still powder-grimed from Dettingen,
Called in thick tones: ‘My Lord, fetch ink and pen.
I’ll write a threatening note in my own hand.
This Chinese potentate must understand
That Britons have a boundless fame to brag.
No insult shall defile our glorious flag.
Two Bristol ships at Hankow fetching tea,
Boarded and robbed, at wharfside as they lay,
Of a costly cargo? Ha, Sir! Let me boast
My fleet stands ready to bombard your coast.
If meek apologies be not forthcoming
My fusiliers must through Pekin go drumming.
You shall eat dirt, d’ye hear, you knavish fellow,
Or we must tan your hide a deeper yellow.
Ten ships shall yearly visit your chief ports
With mirrors, beads, and clothing of all sorts,
Carrying decorum to your savage parts
With civilization, learning and the arts.
But if so much as a rattle’s robbed or broke
Your Chinese territory flies up in smoke.
You then, beware! Signed, GEORGIUS REX. So, so.
Our Foreign Minister sends this. Take it, go!’
The Foreign Minister, reading the piece through,
Swore by his wig, why, this would never do.
‘Our Sovereign trips on all the finer points
Of English speech, confuses, blurs, disjoints.
To send this note, ’s blood, it were most unwise.
Suppose it intercepted by French spies?
“La langue du roi…” (I hear their mocking tone)
“Dunce-cap instead of crown, dunce-stool for throne!”
Why, even in China, men would laugh to read
This halting, odd, mis-spelt, improbable screed.
But stay! Our Sovereign we would surely please,
Translating him his Note into Chinese.
Li-Chung will do’t, then there can be no call
To pawn our honour with the original.’
Li-Chung, the Bond Street tea-man with meek eyes
Performed the service, showing no surprise,
Though inwardly enraged and jealous for
The sacred majesty of his Emperor…
How faithful his translation, who can say?
George signed it readily, and it reached Cathay.
The Emperor from his Summer terraces
Claps hands for ink and sable paint-brushes
And writes with care a special declaration
To the Loyal Governor of the British Nation,
Commiserating with that luckless one
By seas exiled from his Imperial Sun
On such outcast and pariah-like condition:
‘We note the abject tone of your petition
And sorry excuses for your impudence
In thus soliciting our Magnificence,
Then, though we cannot in the atlas hit on
A Chinese province (or sub-province) Britain,
We graciously will none the less allow
Ten yearly junks to harbour at Hankow
With skins, blubber, oil or suchlike pelting stuff –
Indeed five junk-loads would be quite enough.
Formal permission signed, YOUR GOD. So, so.
Our Foreign Minister sends this. Take it! Go!’
The Foreign Minister, reading the piece through,
Swore by his pigtail, this would never do.
‘Our Emperor neglects the niceties,
Indeed the major rules, of Court Chinese.
Our iron-helmed Manchu God in battle’s shock
Or warrior council sits as firm as rock,
But as for drafting edict, Note or letter…
My six-year-old could do as well, aye, better.
Can I permit my Sovereign’s reputation
To sink even in a heathen’s estimation?
I’ll tactfully propose it more correct
To send this note in British dialect.
Ned Gunn the boxing-teacher at Nanking
Will soon translate the odd fantastic thing.’
Ned Gunn, a stolid sailor with bold eyes,
Performed the service, showing no surprise
Though, loyal to the death, he felt his gorge
Mount at this insult to victorious George.
His English version (which he owned was free)
The Emperor signed, frowned, sent oversea.
George read the note, puffed out his cheeks, began:
‘He takes his medicine like a sensible man,
Apologizes humbly, swears to behave
With fawning loyalty of dog or slave,
Sadly admits his colour far from white
And trusts this missive is not impolite,
Longs for our British cargoes rich and strange,
Has only trash to offer in exchange.
“May your Red, White and Blue still rule the main
And countless Dettingens be fought again!
God Save the King! Kow Tow! Success to barter.”’
George swore: ‘We must reward him with the Garter.’
HEMLOCK
(Fragment of a late-Greek satire, probably Gadarene,
here for the first time done into English)
Socrates on the seventh day
Sneezed and stretched and went his way,
Then stood bare-headed in the sun
Till seven times seventy days had run.
An equal count of days from these
The exiled Alcibiades
Beheld him in the Chersonese
Yet spectre-faint: the Master said
Plainly, that, far from striking dead,
The hemlock acting inwardly
Gave him invisibility
And life prolonged ten thousand years
With such discerning eyes, with ears
So tuned by music of the Spheres,
He could see through brick and stone,
Could hear the unborn infant groan,
Could catch the plotting, piece by piece,
In Persian courts against fair Greece,
Yea, read the yet unspoken mind
Of Aethiopes or men of Ind.
The Athenian Thirty he forgave
Who thought to end him in his grave
And ‘Athens’ genius I shall be,’
He said, ‘While Athens follows me.’
All this and more did Socrates
Unfold to Alcibiades,
Then slowly disappeared from sight,
Bald head and beard and mantle white.
But Alcibiades for hate
Of his own Athenian state
Until his deathbed gasp concealed
The wondrous message thus revealed.
So Socrates walks here to-day,
In Porch and School and Agorâ
He watches us, all jealousy,
While we exchange our sophistry
Discoursing his philosophy,
He frowns when we omit his mode
Dialecticè – truth’s only road –
He prods us with a touch like ice
If ever falsely we premise,
He weeps glad tears of sacred scent
When we prevail in argument
Against some un-Greek jack-in-the-box
Defending a new paradox –
We kneel to clasp thy phantom knees,
Mouthpiece of wisdom, Socrates,
And while we work thy god-like will
Athens shall be Athens still!
Scepticos heard this popular
Figment in the spice-bazaar,
And good Pisteuon started, shocked
To see the way his neighbour mocked,
Grimacing that ‘this Platonism
Is meshed in sentimentalism,
Encouraging such absolute
Value for a dissolute
Mulberry-nosed philosopher
(A very Plague of Athens, sir)
That if his system is to thrive
They must assume him still alive,
Spying demoniac, brushing them
With his unseen garment’s hem.
Of all religious forms,’ said he,
‘I most detest Necrophily.
Now too the enthusiastic kind
Will so get Hemlock on their mind,
They’ll drink small potions on the sly
And gradually stiffening, die,
To stalk among us afterwards
Flaunting invisible rewards.
A phantom hierarchy, friend,
That is the logical and only end.’
FULL MOON
As I walked out that sultry night,
I heard the stroke of One.
The moon, attained to her full height,
Stood beaming like the sun:
She exorcized the ghostly wheat
To mute assent in love’s defeat,
Whose tryst had now begun.
The fields lay sick beneath my tread,
A tedious owlet cried,
A nightingale above my head
With this or that replied –
Like man and wife who nightly keep
Inconsequent debate in sleep
As they dream side by side.
Your phantom wore the moon’s cold mask,
My phantom wore the same;
Forgetful of the feverish task
In hope of which they came,
Each image held the other’s eyes
And watched a grey distraction rise
To cloud the eager flame –
To cloud the eager flame of love,
To fog the shining gate;
They held the tyrannous queen above
Sole mover of their fate,
They glared as marble statues glare
Across the tessellated stair
Or down the halls of state.
And now warm earth was Arctic sea,
Each breath came dagger-keen;
Two bergs of glinting ice were we,
The broad moon sailed between;
There swam the mermaids, tailed and finned,
And love went by upon the wind
As though it had not been.
MYRRHINA
Ambergris from John Whale’s moans,
Pearls from Jane Oyster’s groans
Who knew no beauty:
Groaning Oyster, moaning Whale,
Myrrhina thinks a merry tale,
Confident in her beauty.
Yet must Myrrhina pay the fee
If she would wear old misery
To enhance her beauty,
Twined at her throat, sweet on her dress
Exhaling innocent carelessness
Of all but maiden beauty.
A pang for every several pang
That round her neck in clusters hang
Of seeming beauty,
Despair for John’s uncouth despair
Breathed from her dancing yellow hair –
The Nessus-robe that beauties wear
Burning away their beauty.
Now must Myrrhina groaning say
She knew not there were bills to pay
For simple beauty,
But pay she must, and on the nail,
Giddied with tears, distraught, death-pale,
Jane Oyster’s debt and John the Whale.
This done, there’s room for beauty.
TWIN SOULS
The hermit on his pillar top
Shuddering lean and bare;
The glutton in his rowdy-shop
With velvet clothes to wear.
The hermit with his finger-nails
Growing through his palms;
The glutton in his swallow-tails
Humming hell-fire psalms.
Glutton: ‘By day I am a glutton,
But (this is my complaint)
In dreams I groan upon your stone
A parched and giddy saint.’
Hermit: ‘By day I am a hermit,
But (this is my complaint)
In dreams a glutton of beef and mutton
Kissing powder and paint.’
Then each began to say and see,
Which cut him like a knife,
‘Visions of dark are more to me
Than this my waking life.’
Glutton: ‘My body is feeble and fat,
My head has never been strong,
If I were to stand on your pillar
I doubt I would stand for long.
‘Heigh me! I am growing old
And gone too far on my way,
In dreams of midnight, bold,
But a coward at break of day.’
Hermit: ‘My body is feeble and thin,
My head has never been strong,
If I were to drink in your manner
I doubt I would drink for long.
‘My eyes are a frosted glass,
My fists are clenched like buckles:
Could I please your saucy lass
With a hand that is only knuckles?’
The glutton on his pillar top
Shuddering cold and bare,
The hermit in his rowdy-shop
Groaning hot despair,
They died and they are buried,
Both on the Easter Day,
Now joined as one in spirit,
Who lived apart in clay.
THE NORTH WINDOW
When the chapel is lit and sonorous with ploughmen’s praise,
When matron and child crouch low to the Lord of Days,
When the windows are shields of greyness all about,
For the glowing lamps within and the storm without;
On this Eve of All Souls (suicides too have souls)
The damned to the Northward rise from their tablets and scrolls,
With infants unbaptized that lie without ease,
With women betrayed, their mothers, who murdered these,
They make them a furious chapel of wind and gloom
With, Southward, one stained window The Hour of Doom
Lit up by the lamp of the righteous beaming through
With the scene reversed, and the legend backwards too,
Displaying in scarlet and gold the Creator who damns
Who has thrust on His Left the bleating sheep and the lambs,
Who has fixed on His Right the goats and kids accursed,
With Omega : Alpha restoring the last as first:
Then the psalms to God that issue hence or thence
Ring blasphemy each to the other’s Omnipotence.
ATTERCOP: THE ALL-WISE SPIDER
James derided Walter,
Twisting him a halter
Of argument and synthesis,
‘Hang yourself, Poet, in this.’
Walter, whistling on a reed
‘Sweet Melancholy’, took no heed;
He lolled against a finger-post,
Preening Fancy’s pinion,
He summoned bogle, elf and ghost
With other trivial sprites that most
Resent the sour dominion
Of James, renowned philosopher;
He clothed each airy minion
With cobwebs, with gossamer,
He bade them cast in bonfire flames
All the writings of this James
To smoke with yon green rubbish, sir!
Myself, not bound by James’ view
Nor Walter’s, in a vision saw these two
Like trapped and weakening flies
In toils of the same hoary net;
I seemed to hear ancestral cries
Buzzing ‘To our All-Wise, Omnivorous
Attercop glowering over us,
Whose table we have set
With blood and bones and sweat.’
These old cries echo plainly yet
Though James sits calmer now
Composed, with spectacles on brow,
Explaining why and how,
Telling on the fingers of his hands
And seldom losing count, the strands
Of intricate silk entangling both his feet.
He points ‘Here this and that web meet,
Yet, I surmise,
A different combination might arise
If that or this worked otherwise.’
He ponders where the Primal Den can be,
He holds the web to have no finity
And boldly adds, ‘Attercop has no base
In any sure discoverable place,
Lost in his own complexities of lace;
A most capricious Beast
Whose tricks need not concern us in the least.
He’s mad or possibly long years deceased;
But this web serves as flooring for us flies.
Who disregards this web binding the skies,
That man himself denies.
The Web! Life! Liberty! All else is lies!’
Lyrical Walter cannot speak
Philosophy, nor use the same technique,
But listen to his natural-magic charm
Potent, as he thinks, for harm
Against the tyrant Attercop.
‘Brush down the cobwebs from the cupboard-top
With a long feather-mop.
Go, cheerily stride at dawn
With careless feet about the lawn
Breaking the threads of gossamer;
This, then, shall prove a token
Of Liberty, my sapient sir,
Attercop, whose proud name with hate be spoken,
His net too shall be broken.’
ANTINOMIES
Lying in long grass one hot afternoon,
Between two eighteenth-century garden statues,
‘Furor Poeticus’ and ‘Phryne Judged’,
I observed my muse in likeness of a grasshopper
Trilling ’Sing, Sing, child!’ So I answered her,
‘What can I sing, Muse?’ And she told me plainly,
‘Always the first thing floating in your mind.
A formless, lumpish, nothing-in-particular.
You take, toss, catch it, turn it inside out,
Do new things with it; wean it, breech it, school it,
Bring it to man’s estate; in your old age
It should support you out of filial duty.’
My mind was empty as the summer sky,
And sleepy with the hum of bees and midges,
Until a sudden clashing clamour began,
The church bells ringing up for evensong.
They checked my natural-magic reveries,
Tuning the mind to more parochial thought,
To Mrs. Ames, the widow, and Miss Bold,
Setting their caps, if gossip may be trusted,
At Cutt, the rector, very bitter rivals.
Red-gowned and surpliced, sawing with his hands,
This Cutt pours rhetoric from my mental pulpit.
The text about the flesh warring with spirit,
Spirit with flesh. Cutt takes the spirit’s part,
Poor, baffled soul; though why he speaks through me
I dare not tempt my curious muse to enquire.
‘Sing, Sing!’ the grasshopper warning comes again.
‘I’ll sing, but here’s fair Phryne’s nakedness
Demands inclusion; let the Sculptor’s Mistress
Plead with a sympathetic voice for flesh.
Now, listen, Muse, what will you make of this?’
His gorgon eyes make stone
Of sweetest flesh and bone;
Resigning true-love’s part
He lets a pedant art
Academize his heart.
For him my body is
A thing of surfaces
For chisels to uncover;
Mathematician-lover
He lets love-splendour pass
In thoughts of line and mass,
And craftsman-like observes
The straightenings and the curves
Of my young excellence
Making its fond expense.
Go, fool! be done with this!
Let steel and marble kiss,
Transcribing the disgrace
Of our untrue embrace,
Let the brisk flakes that fly
Beneath your careful eye
Disclose for all to see
Love’s virtuosity,
Your mind in terms of me,
On either part the same,
Scorned beauty, deadness, shame.
‘That’s well enough,’ my muse said, ‘yet what of it?
A biased history, purporting no more;
Craftily written, rather too precise;
Strung on the thread of an experience
Too sympathetic to the heroine’s case.’
‘Muse,’ I said, ‘Muse! wait, let the theme develop!
We’ll speak a sympathetic word for Spirit.
Here, then! the sculptor’s talking.’
She came as my true friend,
This art our common end.
Who could have guessed at first,
Seeing her so demure,
Wistful and seeming pure,
I’d fixed my love secure
In a strumpet of the worst,
A fly-by-night accurst,
A most malignant slut,
Whose mouth I could not shut
Nor long evade her call?
Flesh was her all-in-all;
I fell, and in this fall
Here, woman, you shall view
This marble ruined too,
My mind in terms of you,
On either part the same,
Scorned beauty, passion, shame.
‘That’s very well,’ my muse said, ‘yet what of it?
Here’s plaintiff and defendant, Roe with Doe,
Cunningly balanced; rather too precise.
A clear antinomy, purporting no more.
Where does it lead us? Mutual ruination,
Deadlock, but have you nothing to suggest,
No swift solution of these tangled knots
By Alexander’s way, or Solomon’s?’
‘Muse,’ I said, ‘Muse, when were you ever content?
I gave you wronged Othello, Shakespeare-like,
And you said “Well enough,” or “None too bad,”
But asked for wronged Iago; that I gave you,
Plainer than Shakespeare, proving very clearly
Misunderstanding never makes a villain.
There was a definite wrong Iago suffered
From this same Moor. I gave that wrong in full.
What did you tell me then? “A mere antinomy,
Cunningly balanced, rather too precise,
Strung on the thread of an experience
Not sympathetic to Iago’s case.”
I tell you, Muse, you’ll have to stay content
This great while yet with such antinomies.
Until all history’s written in that style
(Absolutism made ridiculous),
There’s no room for constructing newer forms.
Be content, Muse, you’re driving me too hard.’
Yet, still, among the clashing noise of bells
And buzzing brazen echoes when they ceased,
My grass-hid muse whirred her dissatisfaction,
‘Critical Box and Cox, Roe against Doe,
Unsolved antinomies, have you nothing else?
Sing, child, a fuller song. Sing, Sing,’ she trilled.
‘A fuller song? Sweet Muse, how can that be,
While I must yet continue implicate
With life half-strangled by its own free-will?
Always, when I am called to approve the rights
Of one or other side in any brawl,
To hold both claims at fault can make no sense.
How can the plaintiff hear me, still recalling
The old wrong done, the insult unavenged,
Drowning my saws with shrill reiteration?
It’s then I brief myself as advocate
For the defence, I advance counter-claims
Raising my voice as loud as his or louder.
“Deny it, plaintiff, nevertheless it’s true.”
He’ll bite on that, distasteful though it be,
And the quarrel marches one step nearer peace.
No one loves conflict on its own account,
But for the hoped-for triumphs it entails.
Then since I hold that, though no conflict ends
Except in ruin of opposing views,
Yet till antinomies plainly stand opposed
Truth cannot rise to knock the swords aside,
What’s to be done? The immediate action’s plain,
To throw my weight the other side of the scales.
Trimming? Contrariness? Equivocation?
Nothing of that. Muse, here’s a novel turn
To Aesop’s fable of the Man and Satyr: –
Blow hot to warm your hands, cold for your porridge.
Then though the simple Satyr stands aghast
Warning his brethren to beware your mouth,
Not even a Satyr could deny this much
That hands need warming, porridge demands cooling,
Rather than frost-bite or the scalded tongue.’
NORTHWARD FROM OXFORD
(An Architectural Progress)
First from, Beaumont Street:
Do you know Beaumont Street in Oxford, city of ghosts and damps?
The eighteenth century curves up, broadly, from Worcester College,
And apart from the ‘Cave of Forty Thieves’* lit by Ruskin’s Lamps
The street has an air of knowledge, strength and confidence in knowledge,
Not the knowledge and strength, admitted, that delights me best,
But politeness, grand proportions, decorum and the rest:
Pass on, then, from Beaumont Street; gloomy but impressed.
Next to Banbury Road,
Leaving St. Giles’s, passing the old bounds of the city.
It begins with the young Victoria, and ends with Edward’s age,
And the middle compromises, solid state with pretty-pretty,
Oh, the Struggle-for-Existence-God’s-in-His-Heaven-Art-for-Art’s-sake stage,
Red brick and gables, Gothic spires, freestone and knick-knackery,
Steep, narrow stairs, dark kitchens, the greenhouse, the rockery,
Beards, bustles, black silk dresses, and the glazed art crockery!
So to Summertown,
By ’bus, to a row of post-war villas, neurotically built,
Standing each at different curious angles to the road,
Each with the most extravagantly individualistic shrug and tilt
Of roof, wall, porch and gutter, as though each abode,
Rosslyn, Sans Souci, Mons defied the serjeant-major, would not dress,
Dumbly blaspheming Banbury Road’s ordered pretentiousness,
The semi-detached pairs writhing in a loveless caress.
So on from Oxford:
Come home with me these three miles beyond Summertown –
If the Cherwell does not flood the fields between –
Our house is older than Beaumont Street, at first sight rather tumble-down
But solid enough; and the windows open, and floors are easy to clean:
A house self-certain, not divided, with a good feng shwee. §
Beaumont Street, Banbury Road and Summertown cannot come to see,
Whom I can no more understand than they can me.
WITCHES
These churchyard witches in pursuit
Of magics most abominate
Urge out their sieves from the cliff’s foot
The midnight seas to navigate,
Or high in air through roaring glooms
With brooms their covens levitate.
I have watched their Sabbath pack –
North Berwickward in flight they came –
Nutcracker face and knobbled back,
Or young breasts bare and eyes like flame,
Twelve to the coven, with one more;
Him they adore in Hell’s own name.
Wedgewise by thirteens they flew,
Each devil sounding his Jews’ trump,
The witches chanting psalms thereto
Mouthing and clapping hand on rump,
That we who watched from Tweed’s far brink
Felt the heart sink like a lead lump.
Such feats on oath we testify
To whom like powers have long been known,
But we for love the cold heavens fly
Which other whiles for lust are flown,
We walk the swellings of the sea
Dryshod and free, for love alone.
Do you, my cribbed empiricist,
Judge these things false, then false they’ll be
For all who never swooped and kissed
Above the moon, below the sea;
Yet set no tangles in their place
Of Time and Space and Gravity.
For Space and Time have only sense
Where these are flattered and adored;
And there sit many parliaments
Where clock and compass have no word,
Where gravity makes levity,
Where reason snaps her blunted sword.
Be wary, lest on unbelief
The cloak of dark one day be spread,
Time shall be grief and Space be grief
And Love in accidie lie dead,
And broomstick rites alone remain
To lend your cramping pain relief.
[The King himself examined Agnes Sampsown: she confessed that upon the night of Allhallow E’en last she was accompanied as well as with the persons aforesaid, as also with a great many other witches to the number of two hundred, and that all went together to sea, each one in a riddle or sieve and went into the same with flagons of wine making merry and drinking by the way in the same riddles or sieves to the kirk of North Berwick in Lothian, and that after they had landed, took hands on the land, and danced this reel or short dance, singing with one voice. Giles Duncan went before them playing this reel or dance upon a small trump, called a Jew’s trump, until they entered into the kirk of North Berwick. These confessions made the King in a wonderful admiration, and sent for the said Giles Duncan, who upon the like trump did play the said dance before the King’s Majesty.]
[A True Discourse of the Apprehension of Sundry Witches lately taken in Scotland; 1591.]
ANTIGONUS: AN ECLOGUE
James, a literary historian; John, a poet.
John. Why, James!
James. Well, John? What are you writing now? Letters?
John. A poem.
James. Are you? Then I’ll go. If I had guessed…
John. ‘Person from Porlock,’* stay!
If you don’t know my only rule for writing
It’s this, to welcome all disturbances
As bearing somehow on the work in hand,
Supplying an unguessed material need.
James. Convenient rule! If you resent disturbance
As you must sometimes do, in spite of rules,
What happens?
John. Then resentment shapes the poem.
And if the scheme was cheerful at the start,
And if my mind swings back to cheerfulness
It takes some time to check the damage done:
My rule is economical in the end.
But, James, what have you walked out here to tell me?
You always spring some literary surprise –
Keats’ early punctuation? or the name
Of Marvell’s wet-nurse, and her views on God?
James. Nothing particular; oh, yes, there was.
Do you recall Antigonus and the bear?
John. ‘Antigonus, crux of the Winter’s Tale,
Running the drama past the accepted mark
That separates the comic from the tragic.’
Or, that’s the verdict that your school upholds.
James. You’ve got the point, then listen! Yesterday
A knowledgeable student of research,
But never mind the name –
John. From Aberystwyth?
James. That’s right – convinced me, giving chapter and verse
That Shakespeare’s story of Antigonus
Besides its knockabout popular appeal,
Hides a discreet political allusion,
Caviare for the courtiers in the stalls.
John. Who was Antigonus, then?
James. Philip of Spain.
John. Philip was dead a dozen years or more.
James. True, but now Spain was pressing Italy,
And England sympathetically aghast
Recalled the Armada threat. When Shakespeare’s Clown
Relates ‘Antigonus roared and the bear roared
The Tempest roaring even louder still.’
And grins ‘The bear wrenched out his shoulderblade,
And the vessel, how the sea flap-dragoned it!’
(Or words to that effect, a comic turn)
Philip was this Antigonus (of the Jews),
A nickname lent him by the pamphleteers.
Dutch, Huguenots, Italians they all used it.
The shoulderblade was actual shoulderblade
Relic of Philip’s favourite saint, St. Laurence,
In faith of which the Armada had been launched:
So, when the tempest and our English guns,
Drake’s Bear leading the van, broke Philip’s hopes,
A savage gust of merriment convulsed
Protestant Europe, with this caricature
‘The Bear tears out Antigonus’ shoulderblade’
Which jest, revived to hearten sixteen-ten
Preserves the comic unities, my friend holds.§
John. I hardly know whether you’re serious.
To accept this correspondence of ideas
Will damage your Shakespearean reputation.
Once you begin it, this political tack
Involves a most unorthodox position.
Couldn’t you try to explain it all away?
James. No mockery!
John. James, I’ll take you one street further.
I’ll tell you more about Antigonus
Than you or Aberystwyth ever guessed.
James (drily). The scientific method aptly used
Can yield results of most romantic flavour.
John. James, if I swear that Julio Romano
Whose fame lives golden in the Winter’s Tale,
Published a pamphlet – fifteen-ninety-three,
It’s most important to invent a date –
Of covert anti-Catholic imagery;
That one torn copy of this book survives
Though not for public reading, at Madrid;
That in this book, Antigonus and the bear
The tempest and the shoulderbone occur
With a deal more about this grim encounter
Than Shakespeare with his fine selective sense
Included – if I tell you this, believe it.
I’ll make it circumstantially convincing,
Though, as you’d say, ‘in point of fact, a lie.’
But does your scientific claim deter me
By its confirmed absolutism? No.
In any case there’ll be no libel action.
No one can copyright Antigonus,
Not even Sydney Lee, or Clemence Dane.
James. Is there much fun in forging history?
Nothing you write can ever alter facts.
John. When you say ‘history’, what does that imply?
The logical or the psychological?
Logical? but there’s history that refers
To another context with new premises
Not bound by challenge of empiric proof.
One day this history may become supreme
As your empiric kind succeeded myth,
And then who’ll be the forger, you or I?
James. John, I don’t follow you: it sounds like nonsense.
I can’t believe you mean half what you say.
Must we revert to myth?
John. No, not to myth
In the dimmer sense, but a new form of myth
Alert, with both eyes open, self-aware –
This is my point, the past is always past
And what the present calls past history
Springs new, capricious, unforeseeable
Not pinned to this or that structure of thought;
Then what the structural classification
Of Bruce and Spider, Washington and Hatchet,
Alfred and Cakes, may prove in time to come,
Or how such tales may alter in essentials
By new research in one vein or the next,
Do you dare prophesy?
James. No, but meanwhile
The empiric structure stands. John, tell your story.
So long as you admit there’s no pretence
Of conformation to what I still call
Absolute truth, I’ll hear you out. Remember
The scientist off-duty loves a lie
When monstrous or fantastical enough,
Or else a lie plausible in technique
So long as he’s admitted to the secret,
But not a lie that blunders near the truth
And trips up over every nicety.
Despite the lavish bounty of their isle
For which they thanked God much, but not enough,
Swiss Family Robinson drove me half-mad.
John. But how?
James. The pious author plumed himself
On his zoology and his botany.
One page he’s quite informative, the next…
John. He’s tied his Wallace Line in loops and bows
And croquet-hooped his lines of longitude.
James. It makes my head ache.
John. I’ll respect your head.
Now then: –
Antigonus, Romano writes,
Was not the sole Sicilian lord entrusted
With the marooning of young Perdita.
There was another gallant, of Sigunto,
Fernando Campi, ‘who in schools of fence
Where foils are tipped with buttons, had such fame
For quickness with his thrust, parry, quart and tierce
That, had he burst upon the field of war
Single against whole companies of swordsmen
(So went the common rumour through the Land)
He would have spitted them as cooks do larks,
And borne away the spoils of victory.’
But somehow there was peace in Sicily
And since Fernando never picked a quarrel,
And since he shone so bright in feats offence
He’d fought no duels with the naked sword.
Fernando landed with Antigonus
On the sea-coast of wild Bohemia’s isle.
Falling behind his friend, to lace a shoe,
He saw the bear charge from a bramble thicket.
Antigonus, bold hero, stood his ground,
Unarmed alack, save for a toyish dagger
And roared defiance. But Fernando turned,
Aye, rapier in hand, he turned and ran.
Bawling for help he pelted from the wood:
And came by chance upon a simple clown
Reclined in a green dell two miles away
Playing at cards with one Autolycus.
James. Autolycus? I seem to know that name.
John. Don’t cramp my neo-Elizabethan manner.
James. I thought John never minded being disturbed.
John. He bade them follow speedily to the rescue.
They had no arms, they said. He found them arms,
Cutting stout quarter-staves from an oak hedge.
Forward! alas, they found the ravenous bear
Scarce finished dining on the gentleman.
James. What then?
John. Antigonus had two bold brothers
Marco and Cassio, a wife Paulina,
And a dear friend, Clement, a learned friar.
The finish of the story lies with these.
From mouth to mouth rambling circuitously,
News reached them how Antigonus had perished,
And of the coward part Fernando played.
But no one could believe it of Fernando.
Some three years later, back the traitor comes:
He makes complete admission of the facts,
With lame excuses palliating these;
He suffered from a sickness of the bowels,
He had no skill with bears, his wrist was numbed,
He thought he heard men’s voices coming near
So ran to call them, but they came too late.
Now offers to expend ten thousand crowns
In reverent masses for his dear friend’s soul.
Paulina spat and smote the coward’s cheek,
Her brothers challenged him to mortal duel
But he reneged, flying for sanctuary
To the same chapel where this Clement was.
Now Clement who had loved Antigonus
More than his own life, loved these brothers too,
And held Paulina in sincere affection
And for Fernando’s parts had great esteem.
What should he do, but plead ‘Forgive the traitor,
Forgive, forget, receive him back again,
Think how he suffers in black self-reproach.’
They would not hear him. Clement told them then
‘Forgive Fernando, or cast Clement off.’
So choosing hotly, they cast Clement off.
Clement, to prove his spirit of forgiveness,
Though, true enough, Fernando used him coldly
Admitting neither cowardice nor shame,
Dedicated him a friendship’s garland
(Fernando took it as a covert sneer)
His life’s work, a text-book on Garden Pests….
I’ll give the fifth act of the tale in brief:
At last Fernando in revenge of slights
Betrayed his island to the Turkish Fleet,
Ravished Paulina from her second husband,
Had Cassio and Marco maimed and branded
And Clement perished in Sigunto’s sack.
James. An edifying tale; but I can’t follow
The ramifications of your allegory.
Who was Fernando, to the pamphleteer?
Medina-Sidonia? or the Duke of Parma?
John. Scholastic James, I haven’t yet considered
Romano’s dark political references:
If you’ll decide Fernando’s prototype
In Philip’s day, I’ll re-arrange the details.
Meanwhile, a simple tragedy of manners,
An ethical tangle, for your comment, James.
James. I find that simple: Clement was a Christian.
John. But are you satisfied with Clement’s fate?
James. Satisfied with its probability, yes.
He acted as his Saviour would have acted,
He suffered as his Saviour would have suffered.
John. Do you approve his action?
James. Yes, I do.
John. And you condemn Fernando?
James. Very strongly.
John. Marco and Cassio?
James. Deserved their fate.
John. Paulina?
James. What else happened to Paulina?
You left your fifth act in the air, I think.
John. She died by her own hand, but killed Fernando.
James. I like Paulina, in the tragic style.
John. And I dislike them all impartially.
James. What, Clement too?
John. Certainly, Clement too.
James. Well, what do you think Clement should have done?
John. Disliking Clement is not blaming him.
I told you, Clement was a Christian friar
And his whole life centred in Christian doctrine.
He had no option: as he did, he did.
James. Well, what would you advise Clement to do
If ever you met a man in Clement’s case?
John. Nothing I could advise a Christian saint
Would ever touch him: I should hold my tongue.
James. Put it another way, then, logic-chopper,
If you were Clement, in a general sense
But bound by no particular monkish ties,
How would you wish to act towards either party?
Which side would you support? Paulina’s side?
John. Never; Fernando too had been my friend,
And though he acted in an ugly way,
(Break-downs are always ugly) could he help it?
It was his first experience of danger,
And there’s no bear like a Bohemian bear,
For size of paw, or length of claw, or strength of jaw.
James. Would you support Fernando, then, like Clement,
But not with Clement’s full extravagance?
John. No, could I so offend my oldest friends?
Think what Fernando’s conduct meant for them.
Courage, among Sicilian noble houses,
Courage and loyalty were the two prime virtues.
Forgiveness came a bad third on the list.
Forgive your foe – but only a brave foe,
Acquainted with the laws of chivalry.
Forgive your friend – but not the traitor sort,
Only the headstrong, ‘Come, then, fight me!’ friend.
That was the strict Siguntine code of manners.
James. Well, then? If you would neither blame Fernando
To please Paulina and her brothers-in-law,
Nor yet reproach Paulina to Fernando,
Fernando cursing her, what follows then?
You have lost everything, antagonized all
And thrown away even this satisfaction,
‘I acted as my Saviour approves action.’
John. If I had strictly kept from taking sides
I would conclude that both my former loves,
Affection for Paulina and the brothers
And admiration for Fernando’s parts,
Were tainted with a strong self-interest,
Therefore the better for complete suspension.
James. So you would still abstain from taking sides?
John. So far as it were possible to abstain.
But with this trust, that before many months
A change would come on either side; Fernando
Would play the hero on the field, perhaps.
Paulina and her brothers by the play
Of quick political changes might be found
Cowardly and disloyal in their turn
In spite of every virtuous resolution:
Then from the ruin of opposing views
Securer friendship might again be borne
And with the changing sides, I too would change.
James. Do you find Providence always runs so slick?
John. I do, but leave it as a mere assumption,
The philosophical ‘why’ can wait its turn.
Let this bear dine on its Antigonus
And inwardly digest him undisturbed.
James. Tell me, what was the poem you were writing?
John. Only an eclogue between you and me:
Or, that’s its newest phase: its past is past.
As for its future; when I’ve done, you’ll say,
‘Well, John, it might have better stayed in prose.’
And with your grim scholastic mind, you’ll add,
‘Why eclogue? Eclogues treat of goats, not bears.’
James. Then you’ll dance off into psychology,
And ‘psychologic truth’ and verbal quags.
ESSAY ON CONTINUITY
With unvexed certainty
Historians trace their line
Of continuity
To plot the march of wine
From vineyard, press, tun, bin,
To throats of church or inn.
But after? But before?
Your logic baffles me
That this line runs no more,
True continuity,
Back to the soil, or on
To life in flesh and bone.
For, unless men are wine,
As you deny they be,
Unless you stretch the vine
In continuity
Back to the darksome, dead,
Prone earth on which it fed,
There shines no sense at all
From your cramped history
Of rise, endurance, fall:
Discontinuity
Havocks your central claim,
Disturbs your every aim.
Yet, if wine’s progress stands
Forever sure, made free
Of hampering laws and bands
In perpetuity,
By logic it would seem
Bacchus is God supreme.
Not so? You have ears, eyes,
And other senses three,
Wherewith to recognize
True continuity
Of proven forms and shapes?
Wine’s wine, and grapes are grapes?
‘Old knowledge of these forms,
As all but fools agree,’
You say, ‘survives the storms
Of contrariety?
The lexicon defines
Such knowledge with close lines?’
What witness have you found,
What faith or warranty,
That these forms must abound
In perpetuity?
If grapes defy the press?
If wine lose tastiness?
Must wine proceed from vine?
Gana of Galilee
Saw water turned to wine,
Then continuity
In blank amazement stops
Where grapes are water-drops.
Illusion? Miracle? Dream?
Whatever cause you see,
There’s something checks the stream
Of continuity,
Reneges, annihilates,
Knowledge of modes and states.
Then stretch what lines you please
In the name of history,
(For men must live by these)
Yet continuity
Shall yet demand in vain
Absolute right to reign.
So, the moving pictures flick
In continuity.
Charles Chaplin twirls a stick
And leers at you and me.
Scene chases hard on scene
Denying gaps between.
So, the trimmed poem runs
As facile as can be
Though it acknowledged once
No continuity,
A scrawling impotence
That knew not its own sense,
Darting from this to that,
Champagne to Galilee,
Kant’s tome to Chaplin’s hat,
Yet continuity
Appears awhile and is,
And again perishes.
Perishes, springs again,
In perpetuity;
No smallest rags remain
Of its past history:
New knowledge comes, new shapes,
New wine, new lips, new grapes.
KNOWLEDGE OF GOD
So far from praising he blasphemes
Who says that God has been or is,
Who swears he met with God in dreams
Or face to face in woods and streams,
Meshed in their boundaries.
‘Has been’ and ‘is’ the seasons bind,
(Here glut of bread, there lack of bread).
The mill-stones grumble as they grind
That if God is, he must be blind,
Or if he was, is dead.
Can God with Danäe sport and kiss,
Or God with rebel demons fight,
Making a proof as Jove or Dis,
Force, Essence, Knowledge, that or this,
Of Godhead Infinite?
The caterpillar years-to-come
March head to tail with years-that-were
Round and around the cosmic drum;
To time and space they add their sum,
But how is Godhead there?
Weep, sleep, be merry, vault the gate
Or down the evening furrow plod,
Hate and at length withhold your hate,
Rule, or be ruled by certain fate,
But cast no net for God.
MOCK BEGGAR HALL: A PROGRESSION
I
Poet. Last night I dreamed about a haunted house: it was hardly a frightening dream or a gloomy dream, though I have for a long while been vexed by that kind of nightmare, but a disturbing problem-ridden affair demanding the comments of a moralist. The setting was something like that of Mock Beggar Hall at Oxford, once a leper-house outside the city walls, then a parsonage, now a private house where undergraduates lodge.
Philosopher. Have you ever heard whether the Hall is actually haunted?
Poet. No, but it occurred to me when I last visited there that it had every excuse for being so. In the dream I saw lepers and a parson and other odd ghosts alternately invading the rooms: thereupon a voice informed me that the lepers once used to haunt the parson and were themselves once haunted by these other nameless bearded ghosts, and now both parson, lepers and the bearded ones quarrel for turns to haunt the present occupants. I was asked in all seriousness what was to be done about it, but I could make no suggestion.
Philosopher. You discovered the sense of the allegory?
Poet. The dream follows naturally on the discussion we began yesterday. The ghosts represent the antisocial impulses in the individual. The new element which the dream has added is an observation that as social systems evolve, new modes of behaviour are expected from the individual and the old modes are discountenanced. But certain individuals cling to tradition, then as each mode claims complete liberty of action at the expense of other interests there follows continual friction. Is there any solution for these troubles? The name Mock Beggar Hall promises little hope.
Philosopher. Now that the problem is stated in this completer form, I shall be interested to hear your dreams tomorrow morning. I expect them to bring you to some sort of conclusion: it will not be the first time that our dreams and our philosophy have developed concurrently.
II
THE NEXT DAY
Philosopher. Well, what were your dreams?
Poet. Forgotten. But last night I began writing a poem and this morning I finished it; and as apparently my dreams provided something that enabled me to finish this morning, quite easily, what seemed an impossible problem last night; and as poetry and dreams are closely allied and sometimes identical, your expectations have been more or less satisfied.
Philosopher. Well then, read!
Poet. You, landlord, when your tenants make complaint
Of uncouth doings in the black of night,
And even in decent sunlit hours of day;
Of choristers who practise doleful anthems
And the grey vicar, candlestick in hand,
Hunting his spectacles from room to room;
Or when they speak of eviller visitations
Of faces silver-white, noseless and earless,
Outcry of clappers, inarticulate moans;
Or tell how always on a Saturday
Come gaunt old men, with beards and parchment rolls
And long-drawn Babylonian misereres
Trailing procession through the solid walls;
Or when they chance on scenes of solemn passion
Where, cloak and toga duly hung on nails,
Breast kisses breast and thighs are joined with thighs
While incense bums beside the rose-wreathed couch –
Be then the historian concealing nothing,
Inform them of the age of this foundation,
Registry-office now, once parsonage,
Before that lazar-house; farther back yet
Synagogue (in the reign of good King John)
And even before, a shrine to Roman Venus;
Whose tenants in each stem successive age
Had variance with their ghostly predecessors,
Each making claim for undisturbed possession.
Relate how once with candle, bell and book
The surly vicar strove to exorcize
Ghosts of the lepers, but they stayed to plague him,
Being blind, stone-deaf and obstinate in grief.
Tell them, these lepers when they lived in flesh
Saw phantoms too, they cowered in palsied fear
From the rabbi and his fur-capped congregation.
Nor had these Jews enjoyed possessive peace,
They had called the vengeance of their angels down
On ghost defilers of God’s chosen place,
The Venus-worshippers; archangels even
Proved powerless to evict them. And these Romans,
Had they no strange incursions at their shrine
Of Druid knives and basket-sacrifices
Breaking the sacred raptures of the kiss?
Was not their temple founded here to mask
The lopped oakgrove of aboriginal gods?
Then let your tenants, duly warned, consider
Their duty as the present occupants
Or their advantage, if that touches nearer,
Of being the first to practise tolerance,
Allotting private times to every faction
Inviolable by others, quick or dead;
Reserving for themselves, free from all trespass
Such office-hours as business may demand,
Lest, failing to deal fairly, they themselves
May century-long be doomed to walk these rooms.
Then let them think it more than possible
That future tenants may resent intrusion
At casual moments of the night or day
Of Gretna marriages, proud fatherhood
And red-eyed notifications of decease.
There it finishes: but I did not recognize until after the poem was written why I had made the haunted house a registry-office, though I was aware that during the war Mock Beggar Hall had been used as a Government office-building: it evidently symbolizes European civilization, officialdom attempting to control the individual from the cradle to the coffin. The allegory has broadened from the conflicts within the individual to the conflicts between groups of individuals. I had only recognized, before I began writing, that the Romans and the Jews were standing respectively for flesh and spirit: it seems now that they also symbolize the two main historic streams, often conflicting, to which Europe owes her legal and religious development.
Philosopher. If you are waiting for my comment, it is this. The poem has only just begun its broader allegory. While I approve the idea of tolerance, as you know, I question your solution: it appears too much like a compromise, and compromises can by their nature only lead to further conflict. The registrar draws up his very characteristic time-table and gives himself all the best hours of every day but Sunday; will the ghosts be satisfied?
Poet. I appreciate your point. I am afraid that this Haunted House is going to haunt us for a great while yet.
III
A WEEK LATER
Philosopher. Are there any new developments of the poem you read me?
Poet. Mock Beggar Hall? Yes. A lawyer and the landlord have started an ethical dialogue. The lawyer after beginning with the poem more or less as I read it you has been answered as follows: –
I must confess myself vastly surprised
To hear a lawyer recognizing ghosts
Possessed of individual rights and feelings,
Instead of taking the old legal stand
‘Once the estate is settled, the man’s dead.’
Your lyrical presentation, too, was fine.
And I admire your sense in recognizing
There’s a commercial and a legal question
Bound up with hauntings.
(Then the lawyer says complacently):
That’s sound common sense.
(The landlord picks him up quickly):
Yet common sense, the Anglo-Saxon flair
Seems weakest on its vaunted practical side,
Compromise, managing the unruly factions
With ‘You stay here’ and ‘You keep over there’.
Only advice at first, no hint of arms.
‘We have no greed for power, desiring only
Business connections, order, progress, Peace.
Trust us; we can restore your fainting land.
We’ll be your servants, stewards and managers.’
For awhile, admitted, things go well enough.
At first mere arbitration, registration,
Statistics, scientific service, steam,
Development of minerals, harbours, roads.
‘Responsibility weighs most heavy on us.
Not central power, mere central agency
For news, views, experts on one thing or other.’
Yet gradually by slow degrees appears
A small police well drilled with guns and rods,
A loyal stem Praetorian Guard, abets
The rising tyranny; soon Augustan splendour,
The pink Protectorate grown Empire-red,
Army and Navy, Laws, poll-taxes, fines,
History written as ‘Divide and Rule’
By loyal Virgils, ‘Tu regere imperio
Populos, Romane’ and the rest of it,
Clipped powers of movement for the native tribes,
Still a pretence of representative rule
With general fatness, general acquiescence.
National debit swings across to credit,
And every weak dissenting voice goes dumb.
The Jews enjoy each Saturday for Sabbath,
Christians enjoy each Sunday for their Sabbath,
And all goes well until some Christian Feast
Falls on a holy Jewish Saturday.
Then the new power, foreseeing grave events
Calls out the lathi-wallahs to line the streets.
Order must be preserved whatever the cost.
Then ‘Head Cue, ‘Fork Cut’, ‘Belly Point’, ‘Charge Lathis’
Where two processions take converging routes.
They drive both backward to their starting points,
Killing a few, breaking some arms and legs,
With a complacent ‘But for us, of course
Things would have been far worse’, which pleases no one.
Then ‘Those ungrateful swine’; ‘These arrogant bullies’
Whispered at first, soon shouted in the squares
When distant Rome outlasts her conquering noon,
Next, boycotts, massacre, non-co-operation,
And the play drags to its anarchic end.
No, sir, though I admit the attempt will come
In much the manner you have just outlined
Towards settling the disputes between these factions,
I’ll take no part in hurrying on events.
No arbitration I could give would lull
Suspicions of an interested motive.
I sailed along easily so far, but then grounded: now I have come to talk it over with you.
Philosopher. How it broadens! but why this satire on British imperialism? How does it rise out of the former version of the poem and the original dream? I believe I see the connexion but please reassure me.
Poet. Surely this, that efforts to exploit one mode of behaviour in the individual at the expense of all others is a form of imperialism comparable with a political imperialism, and though at first it is the ready solution of former difficulties, all imperialism as such is bound in its later stages to run a certain unhappy course. Besides, British Imperialism is not singled out for illustration; Roman imperialism is hinted too, and at one point I was considering the origins of the recent tyranny in Russia; although not invaders from outside and honestly communistic the Bolsheviks started and developed along the usual imperialistic lines. All imperialisms, Tartar, Mogul, Rajput, Aztec, Spanish; there is no difference in the outline of their rise and fall.
Philosopher. That part will stand, then. But I am not happy about the relations between your lawyer and your landlord. If the landlord is really a landlord, he cannot afford to criticize the legal methods that maintain him. How did he become landlord except approving and approved by the lawyer? I make this criticism not in any formal scholastic sense. I do not mind whether poems continue the single-strand logic of the Classicist or the metamorphic logic of the Romantic method – I am just continuing your allegory.
Poet. I know that, but I can hardly follow yet. Probably this is the sandbank where I ran aground.
Philosopher. Did you see what General…what General Dunkel said about the Indian question at Cascara Colony in Africa?
Poet. Tell me. I have always been taught to regard Dunkel as the one honest man in world-politics; since his insistence on the rights of European subject races when the map was being arranged four years ago, and his recent outburst at the Imperial Conference.
Philosopher. His comment was something to this effect. ‘Why should the Cascara Indians, with their tradition of an exclusive caste system, object to us English becoming the military and administrative caste, which in a modern state takes precedence of all others?’ He pointed out that the white races have obviously developed the sciences of government and war further than either the brown or black races.
Poet. I don’t blame Dunkel, he could hardly have taken any other view. A verbal question by the way; I believe that it would add greatly to the amity of nations if the word pink were substituted for white, and blue for black as you talk of a blue Persian cat: there is a powerful symbolic suggestion in white and black, white for honour and purity, black for dishonour and devilry.
Philosopher. Neither do I blame Dunkel; and the apparent inconsistency of his attitude is easy to explain. It is possible for him to be generous to European subject races where he is not personally concerned and where it is only a case of pink against pink, but in his own continent the hegemony of the pink races over the blue and brown must be assured. It is an interesting comment on your lawyer character that Dunkel began his career as most politicians do by practising law.
Poet. Enlarge on the imperialistic question, please.
Philosopher. Although not pink myself, I can sympathize with the Pinks – as you know I spent some years in one of the few surviving Brown tyrannies outside the Pink Raj. These Pinks, then, once they are firmly enough established on Brown territory explain themselves thus. ‘Here we are, and here by fate, we stay. We hate our exile and we hate your climate, but we are forced to maintain ourselves here because, for one thing, there is not enough scope at home for the military and administrative professions to which we have been educated. In the wider sense, we stay here because our country is organized for trade and industry and is dependent on yours for a steady supply of raw materials and a steady market for our admirable manufactured goods. You Easterners have a proverb “First, the Bible, then the enamel basin, then the bayonet.” It is unhappily true about the bayonet, but a minority is always at the mercy of the majority unless it controls the administrative offices, and these finally depend on bayonet power. We act only in self-defence and I think you will agree that we manage very efficiently. As for certain disagreements that have arisen between us, you must recognize that being Pink we cannot afford to live in these unhealthy coast-cities and plain-cities all the year round. Our families have joined us here now and in the heats we must all take our turn for going up to the hills; to stay where we are would kill us quickly. Therefore whether by Bible, basin or bayonet we intend to possess ourselves of the hill-stations which you formerly occupied and to keep these safe for Pinks. You are Browns, some of you even Blues, therefore you can, though with difficulty, survive the summer on the plains and in the coast-cities: we are sorry for you, but life is as a struggle for existence, and by this arrangement we can both just survive. Remember that if ever there is a famine in the land, our administrative genius will alleviate it as usual; that is to say, after we have taken our share of the rice supply and after the usual quantity has been shipped home and paid for by the money that covers our salaries, we will then equitably distribute what is left among you. If there is only just enough rice for us to eat we will not send any home (we can get our salaries by simple land taxes) but we will equitably share among your provinces the rice-water in which our rice has been boiled: and you can drink it out of our admirable enamel basins.’ That genuinely well-disposed attitude is what the subject races call ‘mocking the beggar’.
Poet. I see. Then Dunkel will only be able to support the League of Nations’ ideals when his own basin of rice is not threatened. Similarly the Pink Americans are up against a Blue Problem in the South. The pink minority there found that it could not survive when the blue majority had been given the franchise by well-meaning but unintelligent Dunkels in the North: there followed the original Klu Klux Klan revolt, and pink hegemony was restored under a legal fiction of democracy, that is, Blue voted, Pink voted, but the Blue votes were left uncounted in the Ballot box: or it amounted to that.
Philosopher. Again, the Struggle for Existence way of looking at human relationships insures that, where an imperialism is tottering, the ancient honest virtues approved by a Cato or a Cincinnatus tend to disappear in political circles. You will find the central government of a province spending an annual sum of millions, through its secret service, on keeping one subject-race at loggerheads with another. This enables them to point out the necessity of their continued government, if the country is not to be torn in pieces. Meanwhile the subject races, who have developed each in their own communities the moral code of schoolboys, prisoners or prostitutes, that lies and low cunning are commendable when directed against the system that holds them down, begin to abandon their former technique for a sort of mutinous self-righteousness corresponding with the changed technique of their oppressors.
Poet. I’ll put the poem away for a bit.
IV
A MONTH LATER
Poet. Do you remember Mock Beggar Hall?
Philosopher. I have been expecting some more news: read it as it stands now.
Poet. I am not at all satisfied with it as a final version of the poem, but a new point has emerged: that you cannot talk about the Voice of India or the Voice of England or the Voice of Civilization or the Voice of the Individual, even, where these are not any longer entities but storm-centres, rough houses of acute conflict. So in the poem as I read it to you last time, though the lawyer still makes his lawyer speech, and gets the same answer, the man who answers him is not called the landlord but just ‘The Other’, because as landlord he cannot co-exist with the lawyer. He represents the hope of reintegration in these groups. He has no contact with the lawyer’s practical suggestions because the law is fed by litigation and because he cannot realize himself as owner of the property until the rival claims to the estate disappear and the tenants quit.
Philosopher. Well, then.
Poet reads:
LAWYER. My card, sir.
THE OTHER, (reads). John B. League of League and Action,
Solicitors, late Liberty and Action.
LAWYER. I have come to speak about some real estate
Between King Street and Martyr Avenue.
I understand that’s yours, or we could prove
Your legal title if you cared to employ us.
May I continue, sir?
THE OTHER. Then, Mr. League
Let this be talk and not a consultation;
Nothing you say must prejudice my purse.
I’m not the landlord yet.
LAWYER. Quite so.
THE OTHER. Remember
I never dealt with Liberty and Action
Nor feel disposed to deal with League and Action
Though Mr. Liberty, I hear, is dead.
LAWYER. Poor man, he got the firm in disrepute.
A most efficient lawyer in his day
He suffered from delusions towards the finish,
Undertook business far beyond his means
And drove the office-staff nearly distracted.
He left us terrible liabilities
(I make no secret). Now he’s dead, however,
We have regained the confidence of the Banks.
Business increases nicely, every day
We get new clients…still if you mistrust…
THE OTHER. No, talk by all means.
LAWYER. Well, sir, I hear rumours,
Deterioration of the property,
Domestic differences, complaints and so on.
Let us assume your title, for the moment,
And now suggest a method of improving
The rentable value of this fine estate.
If you approve this, we would ask the favour
Of taking legal steps on your behalf.
(Then he continues with the passage).
‘Then landlord when your tenants make complaint
As I have ample evidence that they will.’
The Other answers him as before
‘I must confess myself vastly surprised’, et cetera,
But goes on:
Then too, though you assume my landlord’s claim
I’m not a landlord in the legal sense,
Nor do I wish to press a legal claim.
My ancestors last held that property
By arch-druidic right in Celtic times.
So I possess no title deeds to show
Beyond a hopeful old prophetic verse
Engraved on a bronze bowl in Ogham writing,
That says, this property was one time ours
And will eventually be ours again –
Two thousand years is mentioned, from what date
Does not appear exactly – ‘Then’, it runs,
‘The existent legal titles will fall through
Confirmed by whatsoever authority.’
LAWYER. My dear sir, if this bowl is genuine,
And if your genealogy runs down true…
THE OTHER. No! understand that I prefer to wait.
Then Mr. League, when these two thousand years
Expire, and the whole property reverts
Either to me or to my heirs-at-blood,
Then, on the day that we resume the house,
In a most real sense we become the house,
A house that’s continuity of the tenants
Through whom by slow accretion it evolved,
Taking the individual stamp of each,
Often at odds, room against room divided,
Waiting the landlord-absentee’s return,
Long while despaired of such reintegration.
We being the house then, a house whole and free,
Become the continuity of these ghosts,
And there can be no question of annoyance
Or hauntings in the former vicious mode.
No one will claim possession; if ghosts come
They’ll come as guests laughing at ancient frays
And what new conflicts rise in future years
Between my heirs, or my heirs’ assignees
Those we can leave trustfully to their fate:
That man’s a monument of discontent
Who grieves beyond the next millennium’s promise.
LAWYER. There’s nothing to be done, you say, but wait?
Deterministic sloth! what place is left
For self-control and social betterment
If you leave conflicts to be solved by fate?
Settle the house, now: show them who is landlord.
(We’ll arm you with imposing parchment deeds
To prove their lease is held from you direct)
Where diplomatic tact has failed, use force,
Threaten eviction, hint a legal loophole
By which their lease can be foreclosed at will.
THE OTHER. Such restlessness can spare no time for thought.
It’s do, do, do! Hack through, or muddle through!
But my mind runs ahead to consequences.
How can I oust the present landlordry
(There are three rival claims to this estate)
Without ill-will all round? as for the tenants
How can I hope to impose my dominant will
Without the unavoidable repercussion
Of subjugation to another’s will?
And what’s the end of muddling through, but muddle?
As for your self-control, when have you tried it?
When have you ever yet refused a brief
Even though you knew your client had no case?
When have you ever abstained from good advice
Even though you knew it could not be accepted?
Does litigation make for social peace?
Go your own way, sir, with your files and ledgers,
Support the likeliest of these rival claimants.
I’ll stand aside.
LAWYER. You’ll not impede our action?
THE OTHER. I’ll give you that assurance.
LAWYER. Come! In writing?
THE OTHER, (writes it out). Now leave me to my hopeful feats of sloth,
The absentee’s profession that you loathe.
Philosopher. I am not sure whether you have seen one point that for me comes out clearly. That while there are several claimants to the position of landlord, the domestic troubles between the tenants and the ghosts can hope for no solution. In fact, while the friction continues between political groups the moral conflicts within the individual cannot disappear. We noticed in the European War how the breakdown of the Ten Commandments in their regulation of the political conduct of nations involved the weakening of these commandments in the individual or small group. I believe that all these problems of conflict can only find a settlement together, and that League of Nations ideals which are as old as human society, and not a new discovery of 1919, must in practice always be defeated so long as the idea embodied in the word Nation remains. I think we are seeing things more clearly now: but your poem is not ended yet.
Poet. That may be, but let us record it so far and put a book-mark in until next week or next month, or next year, or ten years hence. Neither are you ended or I ended: but as in each phase of our life we are self-sufficient and complete, so these different stages of the poem.
Philosopher. In your next version what perhaps ought to be made clear is that we are raising no objection to imperialists as being villainous, or more villainous than the people they oppress. As you have shown, in its beginnings imperialism has its positive value: though not a permanent solution of political difficulties between those groups whom the imperial power discovers at odds, intervention is a relief, and an inevitable step towards final harmony. Further, we are holding that wherever unpleasant traits appear in imperialism we cannot judge the subject races to be innocent; where a Gandhi and a Dyer come in conflict it would be ridiculous to claim that either is an angel while his opposite is a demon. Our point is that either they are both angels or both devils. Beggary is as offensive to mockers as mockery to beggars.
Poet. To make an analogy from painting; if we decide ‘in this painting yellow is going to stand for white,’ then nobody need object to the relation between two objects appearing in the painting, one of which has hitherto appeared bright blue and is now shown as bright green, and another which has hitherto appeared dark blue and is now shown as dark green; the relation between the two objects remains virtually the same. But to paint the first object bright green and the second dark blue, that causes popular confusion unless many people are involved in the same sort of conflict that has altered the painter’s conventional colour-values.
Philosopher. Yes, what we are trying to point out is this, I believe, that hitherto attempted solutions of political and individual conflicts have always taken the form of judging one party or one mode of behaviour to be better or worse than the opposing party according as it conforms to a code of ethics, pretending to be absolute, adopted by the dominant political group or culture. The ‘better’ interest has been rewarded, the ‘worse’ punished. That is a matter of history, and it is also a matter of history that, so to speak, the swing of the quintain has always knocked the tilter off his horse. You and I are not condemning the lawyer for believing that laws can be absolute; if we could understand the history of human relationships before any moral codes were formulated, we would sympathize with him wholeheartedly. All that we are suggesting is that the time must come, now that the absolutist claim has been recognized and questioned and an alternative proposed, when there will be no further use for the lawyer or imperialist of tradition, when human relationships can be conducted according to a different system: that is, mutual abstention from conflict when conflict is recognized as obtaining, and a positive faith that the very fact of abstention and endurance will introduce a new element to solve existing differences.
Poet. I agree; but I hope that I have already made it clear that between the lawyer and the Other (that is, I suppose, the traditional view and the view that we are holding) there is no conflict. The lawyer has his important part to play in history; but so have we.
THE RAINBOW AND THE SCEPTIC
‘Decrees of God? Of One Prime Cause?
Predestinate for men,
Whose only knowledge of such laws
Is change and change again?
‘Made free or fated, what care I
In truth’s grand overthrow?
Since knowledge is but folly’s spy
It is not sane to know.
For Fate’s a word of trivial sense
And Freedom is knocked blind,
If there is nowhere permanence,
If God can change His mind.’
Disconsolate and strange enough
He walked the forest side,
The sun blazed out, the shower drew off,
The rainbow straddled wide.
It stained with red the chalky road,
It leapt from sea to hill;
A second arch more faintly showed,
A third arch faintlier still.
The black blaspheming furious mood
Passed from him gradually:
Wry-mouthed in cynic pause he stood
And smiled: ‘The Golden Key.
‘The elf-key at the rainbow’s rise:
Watch it and walk with care!
It vanishes beneath your eyes,
It passes on elsewhere.
‘So laws like rainbows move and mock,
So wisdom never brings
The airy treasure to unlock
The essential heart of things.’…
A spirit of air in answer spoke
With strange and solemn sense:
Music and light about him broke
In seven-toned effluence.
‘Man, Man, accept this new degree
Of beauty as you go;
Observe the march of what must be,
The bend of each new bow.
‘Then since laws move in rainbow-light
Let faith be therefore strong,
That change can never prove you right,
Nor either prove you wrong.
‘shall Time-the-present judge Time-past
Once blotted from its view?
Each key must vary from the last,
Because each lock springs new.
‘Knowledge of changing lock and key,
So much the FINITE is;
Let the bow beckon “Follow me,
Whose hopes are certainties”;
‘Yet beyond all this, rest content
In dumbness to revere
INFINITE God without event,
Causeless, not there, not here,
‘Neither eternal nor time-bound,
Not certain, nor in change,
Uncancelled by the cosmic round,
Nor crushed within its range.’