‘UNTIL THE DAY BREAK AND THE SHADOWS FLEE AWAY’
and the sky veil fell again, and I heard the sound of Sappho's lyre wailing through the stillness of the night———and lo I awoke
* Author's note: Founded on a picture by Simeon Solomon
MYSTERIOUS thing, anomaly divine
Too warm for woman, for a man too fair
The soft shed gold upon thy woman's hair
On thy soft boyish lips, the sweet shed wine
Why dost thou say ‘I flourish in this sign’
What is this, that lureth to despair
Is it the strawberry blossom growing there
Whose leaves thine holy head entwine?
Thou art too fair for woman, this I know
In softer summers of a southern land
Such, sweet, fair secret double blossoms blow
Planted at night, unseen, by some strange hand
On sunlight fed, by warmer breezes fanned,
Alien to this sad land of bitter snow.
I bear nepenthé from distant Aidenn
From a dim far land in the west
To soothe the sorrow, the pain to deaden
Of the stricken and oppressed —
Come unto me, ye heavy laden
And I will give you rest.
Ah where is the balm from distant Aidenn
From the dim far land in the west
Ah give us nepenthé our pain to deaden
We are stricken and oppressed
Our souls with sorrow are sorely laden
And our hearts have craved for rest.
NIGHT falleth softly on the wandering wave
While yet the sun's lingering purple ray
Presses the last sad kiss upon the grave
Of departed day
And the shed odours gently swim away.
Oh most benevolent and kindly night
Folding the sad and stricken to thy breast
And unto those, long wearied of the light
Giving thy rest
Oh thou, that art all good, and triply blest.
Oh thou, that has received Day's passing breath,
With the shed star-beams glittering thine hair
Oh mother of two children, Sleep and Death
One over-fair
And one that longs to love us, did he dare.
Close nestling on thine heart, thy fair child Sleep
Within thine all-embracing arms he lies
And tears of tenderness his eyelids weep
And softened sighs
With the far-off light of childhood on his eyes.
Death with inverted torch sits by thy side
And the grey sea chants forth his litanies
Who loving as the bridegroom to the bride
Maketh us his
Under the shadow of his sacramental kiss.
The sad capricious moon
Crept to thy cradle, sweet
Giving thy lips strange wine to drink
And alien flesh to eat.
INTO the weary world
Sent thee a girl-like boy
Suggesting dreams impossible
Of barren sexless joy.
Thy face reminds me of
Some curious old world tune
Sad fascinating marvellous
And maddening like the moon.
LONDON Bridge is broken down,
Where once the fairies danced,
We shall soon build it up again,—
Now it has far advanced;
Alas, but shall we see again
The Undines shining through the rain?
Even now with faint and flickering feet,
Where very few may see,
They dance along the London street,
But to none visibly,
Save children to whose wondering eyes,
To see them would not be surprise.
There are four great subjects in the world: Faust, Tannhäuser, Don Juan, and Punch.
These may be treated by everyone according to their individuality. The first shows the craving of the human soul for happiness, which upon this earth it may never attain; the second, the eternal war of the flesh against the spirit: the last two the triumph of absolute evil. It would seem, taking it from this point of view, that the last two were identical. But it is not so; they are essentially different. The first Don Juan was conceived by a Spanish monk, and the character is terrible and tragic. It is treated even more sombrely by Grabbe, in an exceedingly powerful drama, though little known; again by Prosper Mérimée; and notably by Balzac, as an intellectual type; though we are chiefly familiar with the type of the frivolous libertine, with a comic servant, degraded by Molière, and still further in the well known opera. The essential type is wholly serious, and chiefly confines itself to one class of wickedness.
The subject of Punch is much more ghastly, because Punch instead of being serious is meant to amuse—and to amuse children.
What can be the origin of this strange drama? We find it everywhere: throughout all Europe, and largely through the East. The principal character appears under various names: Petrushka, Caspar, Karagueuz, and Punch. So it is nonsense to say that Punch is derived from the Italian Policinello, who is one of the characters in the old Italian pantomime, in company with Arlecchino, Colombina, Brighella, and the rest. It is just a chance that our English Punch has taken the form of the Italian Policinello. The Russian Punch, for instance, whose story follows the same outlines as our own, has no hump on his back, or long nose, or such characteristics that characterise our Punch; nor has Karagueuz or Caspar; nor indeed the present Italian Punch, but one and all speak with the same squeaking voice suggestive of utter mockery.
Heinrich Heine tells us that the drama of Faust was first acted in a Punch theatre. Indeed, all the four above-mentioned subjects have one element in common—the triumph of the diabolical. It is in England, curiously enough, where the drama is or was performed in its integrity. So it is with the English Punch we will chiefly deal. The Italian Punch is comparatively amiable and innocent. He spends most of his time conversing with the musician, and does not kill his wife at all. The Russian Punch is also given to conversing with the musician, and is extremely amiable to all the people who come to see him, embracing them one and all, although he kills them all afterwards. And when the Devil comes to fetch him, he comes under the guise of a lamb, so that the amiable Petrushka begins to stroke him, and then suddenly starts up and shows himself in his true form. The Oriental Punch is chiefly obscene, more allied with the Don Juan subject, but he also has an encounter with Iblis at the end. The German, or rather Bavarian Punch, has a particularly trying time of it with the Devil, and asks the children standing by how he shall deal with him. They suggest various things, such as putting him under the saucepan, or hitting him on the head with a frying-pan, and such like. At last a brilliant idea occurs to poor Caspar*. He will hoist the Devil with his own petard. He takes a three-pronged pitchfork, and darts it at the Devil. For the moment it seems he has conquered; the Devil vanishes. But no! the Devil soon reappears, triplified—three Devils instead of one. Is it profane to say that this is suggestive of a certain parable in the Scriptures? Was there any serious underlying meaning in this? I think so. But let us come to analyse the English Punch, with which from childhood we are familiar.
Now Punch is comparatively seldom seen, and when seen, is very much deteriorated. All manner of stupid and superfluous incidents are introduced, such as the alligator with the sausages; and Toby who is wholly extraneous to the drama, and only comes in properly in one scene, where Punch has a quarrel with one of the many persons he kills, about the possession of a dog,—which incident is quite unnecessary—is now made to take the chief part, to show off a performing dog. Often the drama does not finish at all. Let us rather describe the Punch of old days.
I remember—one of the first things that I can remember—an old tattered Punch, which began with a strange scene: Punch's father, who had somethi
ng of the Punch type, making some compact with the Devil, delivering a thoroughly developed Punch-child into his hands. I remember that this then, though I was a very small child, filled me with intense horror. This possibly may be the key to the origin of the Punch drama, which, like Don Juan, may have arisen in the sombre imagination of some monk. But this is only one instance, and I may be exaggerating my reminiscence. Let us come to Punch as he is, and go through his history.
At first he appears amiable; greets the audience, calls for his wife, to whom he displays great affection, and subsequently for his baby—showing himself to be an excellent husband and father. The scene generally indicates an Alpine landscape. Why? It is impossible to tell. The most accurate research can hardly ascertain which was the country where Punch lived and flourished. Its legal arrangements, however, appear to have been very peculiar. Anyhow, this does not matter; Punch is not local, but universal. Sometimes we are led in a way to sympathise with Punch, for instance, in the next incident. He treats his baby with the utmost kindness and affection. The child screams with that utter unmeaning wickedness which is more than mankind can endure. So Punch throws his baby out of the window. Punch's wife Judy (I have never yet been able to discover why she is called Judy, and what is the origin of the name. But in the Russian Punch she is addressed as Jushia; it may possibly have something to do with an old puppet play of Judith and Holophernes**.)—naturally asks him what has become of the baby. He answers, with admirable candour, ‘I have thrown it out of the window.’ She goes down and fetches a stick and commences to beat Punch. Now Punch is not the sort of person who would allow himself to be bullied by his wife, so he seizes the stick from her and retaliates in kind, with the most disastrous result. Whether this murder was intentional or not, I have never been able quite to make out. But it is from that time that Punch's saturnalia of crime begins. The beadle, who in Punch's country seems to be the symbol of all law and authority, comes to upbraid him for his inharmonious conduct. Again, one is compelled to sympathise with Punch, for who would stand being upbraided by a beadle? And having killed one person he does not see why he should not kill another. So he hits the beadle over the head with his staff, and this is deliberate murder number one. Several people then come to see Punch on various errands, and are dealt with in the same way. Only one escapes him—that is Joey the clown. The allegorical meaning of this is obvious; only humour can elude absolute evil. Once more we are inclined to sympathise with Punch, and in that case the person nomenclated as ‘the foreigner’ appears as his visitor. People ought to be able to talk English, and if they cannot originally they should learn to do so. Anyhow, it is absurd to say only ‘shallaballah!’ Then Punch and the clown hold a hideous orgy with the various corpses. The clown puts them into the wrong places, when Punch, with pride, is counting them over.
Then comes the central point of the drama; he has one moment of remorse. Delighted at having killed so many people, he sits dangling his legs over the parapet, singing a frivolous song. A silent white ghost appears in the background. Punch looks round; some remnant of conscience was left in him. He faints at the sight. Recovering, and doubtless being familiar with modern thought, he attributes the appearance of the phantom to natural causes, and thinking himself merely ill, desires to consult a doctor.
Doctors are frequently troublesome about their fees, but when Punch offers the doctor a farthing and asks for change, and the doctor is naturally indignant—It was impolite, to say the least, to kill the doctor also. One may not kill doctors with impunity; the law, Judge, Jury, and executioner—all represented by one person, comes to bring Punch before human justice at last. (How simply things were arranged in Punch's land!) And Punch is cast into prison, where he waxes very doleful, and generally sings the ‘Miserere’ from the ‘Trovatore’. Then comes a representative of Justice bearing the gallows with him. Now poor Punch is to be hanged. Here Punch does a mean trick, very unworthy of his Satanic character. He tells the hangman that he has never been hanged before; and though he would be only too glad to be hanged he does not know which way to put his head into the loop, and asks the hangman to show him, which he does. And Punch suddenly fools the rope, and the hangman, who is the sole representative of legal vindication, is himself hanged! The way that Punch and the clown behave, in putting the body into the too small coffin, is simply indecent. Punch has now lost his manners, as well as his morals.
Hangman hanged, all law and authority defied, and every restraint annulled, Punch bursts out into triumphant song. But as in the former case a still more terrible spectre appears. The arch-fiend himself. Then Punch, with marvellous dexterity, hoists the Devil with his stick; then a hideous travesty of the Messiah, leads Death and Hell into Captivity. Then he laughs in the face of God and man; but it is the Devil who laughs last.
Many people have attempted to destroy the Devil from Punch to Professor Huxley. They have hardly succeeded in doing so.
I have been purposefully treating this subject in a light vein, in order to accentuate its intense horror. Why are we amused?
This hideous, deformed creature, kills several people by knocking them on the head with his stick. Is it amusing to see people killed by being knocked on the head? If so—why? The frightful tragedy of Punch arises from the fact that it is irresistibly comic. And why is it comic? What does the comic mean? I think this might be the explanation.
Being expelled from a Paradise to which we may never return, something of the horror and hideousness of the world is softened to us by the capacity of laughter. In dark silent moments, the ‘timor nocturnus’ as it is termed in the Psalm,—‘the fright of night’—that which has seemed to us during the day to have been merely ridiculous, was turned into intense horror. We could not live if we were wholly alive to all the ugliness of the world. So, even as tears which represent our disappointment in not attaining that which is above, and can never be in this world ours, so laughter consoles us from the terror of that which is below. A nature wholly pure and good would never laugh; it is written somewhere of Christ ‘many men saw Him weep, but none saw Him smile.’
The more corrupt an age becomes, the greater is its sense of humour. I am using the word ‘humour’ from want of a better word. Humour is like blue-bottle flies which are born of putrefaction, and feed on corruption.
Yet nevertheless, let us be thankful we have that sense, when the ugly becomes the grotesque, and the atrocious the comic.
It may seem that I have treated the puppet show too seriously. But I have not. The Punch-drama illustrates exactly the idea that I mean to convey. Really, in its essence, it is more terrible than the three other subjects which I mentioned in the beginning, seeing that it is a subject of laughter to children; and the subject is—the triumph of absolute evil!
* Author's note: Caspar is the name of the comic servant in the old Faust book.
** Author's note: In Tom Jones there is mention of ‘Punch and his merry wife Joan’ so this may be a mere coincidence.
David Tibet honours me by saying my 1970 book, Love in Earnest, had some part in stirring his interest in Stenbock, a remark that led me to retrace my own steps in discovering the Count's existence and his work.
It must have begun, I suppose, with finding his story in an issue of the 1890s Oxford magazine, The Spirit Lamp. The particular number containing his lycanthropic tale, “The Other Side,” was published by the Oxford firm of James Thornton and was amazingly still in print when my researches began in about 1959. One climbed the stairs in Thornton's—mainly theological—bookshop at 33 Broad Street to the building's topmost storey and clambered on a chair to extract from the packet on a high shelf a mint unopened copy of The Spirit Lamp of June 1893. Presenting it for payment lay one open to some searching questions from the assistant at the front desk as to how (and where) the item had been located. In the circumstances, declared to be exceptional, purchase was allowed. I returned several times selecting always only a single copy from the brown-paper parcel. The price was never much more
than a couple of pounds. It would have been a mistake to try and buy the whole stock.
Montague Summers says in his The Vampire, his Kith and Kin how much he liked this story which he most likely read when he was up at Oxford. He also mentions Stenbock's ghost story collection, Studies of Death. A Cecil Court bookseller, Harold Mortlake, a not especially comfortable figure, agent for the 6th Marquess of Bath in his search for any and every book by or about Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler, sold me the art critic, Gleeson White's, copy with a manuscript short story bound in the back which he said, wrongly, was in Stenbock's hand.
I must have been led to Ernest Rhys’ reminiscences of Stenbock that include some unlikely tales because of his editorship of the Camelot series of reprints to which the Count contributed some translations from Balzac. These little books, available in several formats, forerunners of J.M. Dent's ‘Everyman’ series, also overseen by Rhys, were published by the Walter Scott company, taking its name not from the famous writer but from an enterprising Scottish builder of the same name. Some work has been done on the firm by an American bibliographer but there is need for more, discovery for instance of how on earth it came to publish in 1907 Aleister Crowley's Konx Om Pax.
Peter Eaton, one of the last of the working-class booksellers—as he would untiringly proclaim—supplied a disbound but inscribed copy of the Count's rare first book, Love, Sleep, and Dreams, with six lines of Greek (from the Song of Songs) in the author's distinctive handwriting. It's a rare bird: only four copies survive according to my last estimate. One of them belonged to Geoffrey Palmer, another bookseller, who reprinted it in a small edition in 1992.
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