- It was attempted, I believe, in Palestine some sixteen hundred years agone.
- So you may say that God himself approves the cruel means to attain the needful end. Even so, we must school ourselves to the quietening of our stomachs, as with tobacco, delicious nymph. There are some that need not be so schooled. You have heard of the Earl of Essex?
- Heard and, I think, seen. There were two in one of the galleries at the first Tamburlaine, common people, a merchant and his young wife, or so it seemed. There was talk that it was my lord Essex and my lord Southampton, but which was the wife and which the husband was in doubt, the name Mistress Risley I think it was was heard, and both peered from what are called Venetian dominoes.
- Risley is Wriothesley, which is Southampton's family name. Aye, it would be Essex at his tricks, taking his minion to taverns and other places of common resort, surveying his kingdom. A minion of a minion, a minion of the moon that is Cynthia. A boy only, nineteen or twenty, but of an ancient family, we grant it. He boasts of going back to Edward III, his blood richer than the Queen's, who has that of the bitch Bullen in her. He speaks to her very familiarly and she shows her black pegs in complaisant laughter. Games of cards till the birds herald the morning. Well, I thought I had done for him. That whore of a sister of his, Dorothy. You start at the name.
- Another Dorothy. Pardon, continue.
- You know not the story? Well, she made a marriage against the Queen's express command, some rogue who shall be nameless, and they broke into a church with a holy clerk to conduct the ceremony before her family arrived on royal orders to stop it. She creeps back into the court, and there is Essex to plead pardon and reinstatement, but I scotched them both, saying she was in the back row as of your players, one obscured who will opportunely dart forward, and the Queen was angry and then Essex was angrier and he called me a knave and a wretch.
- You were present?
- I was not, but I heard of it. So the Queen pleads that we be friends and Essex says he will kill me first, and by God he means it. It should be swords out, but one my age learns prudence.
- You honour me with this confidence, but I must ask in humility where it leads.
- It means there is a great division in the world, and all who are Raleigh's friends are enemies of the other. Me he will not harm, not yet but the time will come, for now the Queen would not abide it with the war at sea approaching.
- A war? Of this I had not heard.
- I thought you were with Walsingham, no, they said you had left his employ. Well, there are enough captured documents to tell of the Spanish preparations. You will know in time. Meanwhile, my orders to see to the south-coast defences are delivered and under lock. More of that when the time comes. Mark my words of the division. We are not yet friends, but we will be. I have tasted of the quality of your mind. You are of us, who look to the future and are bent on disassembling the old way. You will see what I mean when you come to our next meeting, which will be on Friday at night. You shall be of our party and must expect danger. But a man who does not scorn danger is half of a man. And a great part of the danger will come from Essex. Here, take a pipe and a screw of tobacco. In the solitude of your chamber court the nymph.
He took Kit down the stairs and out of the front door, which may be accounted an honour. He shuddered at blustery November and, giving Kit his hand, a hard one as of a labourer in the fields of the world, said finally:
- The armour is, in fact, of silver. You caught my dream of its being gold. It may yet be gold, we shall see. What name do I call you?
I N the solitude of his chamber, with a fire going and a discarded page of the second Tamburlaine as a spill, Kit courted the nymph without delicacy. He drew her in coarsely to the very base of his lungs and caught hints of her beauty. But then she struck him like some ugly vindictive crone. He vomited into his Jordan, not yet emptied from the morning's libation, and as he vomited he thought he had a vision of hell. He called, and as he called his cool brain all above the paroxysm noted with wonder the names he called, he called on Jesus and Mary and even St Joseph. They derived from a Catholic past before his begetting. Oh God God God, he also called in his retching. For, as we all may attest, no agony is worse than this wrenching and tearing of the inner self, the body assailed by demons or by the devil who rules them in all his filthy majesty. After the last strings of spittle joined the coloured mess mingled with mingo mingere in the Jordan (the river of holy baptism) Kit lay on his floor spent and moaning and cursing the nymph that was in truth most diabolical. Then he must needs sit bare-arced on his Jordan, hand scooping sweat from his brow, and void much black nastiness. His torchecul was yet another discarded page of his play. Heaving then from wretched odours of ordure that filled his little room, he opened the window to a raging November sunset. Streams in the firmament came to him and he grinned sadly at the division of brain and body, that proof of the independence of the soul, the making mind ignorant of the disintegration of corporeal elements. He tottered from his room, Jordan in hands well held away from him, to empty his voidings on to the dunghill that festered at the corner of Hog Lane. This was to be cleared by the paid cleansers - the hovering kites did not find it to their taste, preferring the eyes of traitors' heads set above Temple Bar (eyeless Father Ballard had seen eternity there, the pecked skull long removed, Kit had passed it shuddering). Then, with emptied Jordan rinsed in a raintub on which flowers of filth were afloat, he walked manlily back to his chamber and threw himself on his pallet. He slept long and awoke to the watchman's blessing (past four of the clock). Then hunger struck with no shame. On his table was part of a loaf not yet stale and a hunk of cheese whose redolence did not appal. First he took a draught of wine that was vinegary; in the jug, he saw now from his flinted candle, was the floating white mother that was charged with the ensouring. Then he sat on his bed and ate. His cleansed stomach rumbled reluctant thanks; it had not been well treated. And then, to large surprise, came another hunger, and that was for the nymph. The name, the poet noted, had no English rhyme, save for a street cry never to be heard: What do ye lack 0, here is fine tobacco. A trade to come, an enshipped commodity from Virginia and where? Trinidad, trinity, the Indies of the West that were no Indies. His pipe contained some still, overlaid with its cinders; there was a wet bubbling in the stem. How was it to be cleaned? Sir Walter would know. A thrust wire perhaps. He scoured the bowl with the point of the cheese-knife and recharged. He took yet another Tamburlaine spill and bade her make smoke. He smoked, the word would come in though some would prefer drinking. But here was an organ summoned for a pleasure innutritive, the buggery of the lungs.
It was true pleasure, and he felt some guilt at it. If Christ had known it, would he have transmitted his substance in smoke? The eucharist in a pipe-bowl. He saw Christ an instant, smiling, bending no angry brows. Christ had been called on in that agony now past and not well remembered; the demons had not prevailed. The guilt lay in the pleasure that was not nature's trap and it was analogous, Raleigh was right, to that other pleasure. To rise above the cry of the maw that bread be turned to blood and bone, of the importunate gentleman of the loins that brats be begotten - was not that in a manner of the conquest of nature, vinegary mother that would pull us down? And to overcome nature was to exalt the soul? No matter, the drawing in of this divine smoke was an ecstasy and men would in time perceive it as a great benison to the world. Why did ignorant painted savages already know it? He drank out his pipe and filled another. Ecstasy to be renewed daily, a pleasure as necessary as feeding, there was the problem, with daily ravishing of the nymph no easy entrance to a Henslowe trugging house. The problem of supply and, brutal irony, the body begetting a need no baker or vintner could satisfy. Raleigh was for now the keeper of many keys.
- THERE is in the Cena de le Ceneri, the Wizard Earl said, the character named Prudenzio who is one of those that voglion vivere e morire per Aristoteles - live and die in Aristotle's works. The Nolan says we must purge away doubts and contrad
ictions - purga tutti i dubii e toglie via tutte le contradizioni - by consigning Aristotle to the dust and consulting magic.
- Meaning no more, Thomas Hariot said, than philosophy and the mathematics. Magic smacks of the devil to the uninstructed.
The Earl of Northumberland, ninth Earl, Harry Percy who might, in this privacy, be called Harry, was of Kit's age, assured in his wealth and rank, no minion of the court, a corner of his mind smouldering with resentment at his father's death through holding to the old faith though himself no Catholic, no man of the Reform neither, free of thought (thought is free: there was even a round catch about it), eloquent though often hindered by a stammer which with grace he rode over, the Wizard Earl so called was of Kit's own age and handsomer. He was at pains to douse the magic, that other magic, of his rank in this assembly of the learned and enquiring.
They sat at their ease about Sir Walter's turret study, the black November night wrapping the Thames and its masts, though here and there a ship's lantern swayed afar - Harlot, the Earl, Walter Warner, their knightly host, Kit, all busily smoking, refiring, drawing, the chimney with its banked coals drinking up the blue fumes (smokers, they would say soon, make chimneys of themselves). The smoking was an outward sign of the inward grace of enquiry: it connoted the distant world whence it came and the ocean over which it had travelled. Kit rejoiced that in Raleigh's store-room was a bale not long arrived. Warner's tobacco had been dampened by a spilling of his Malmsey. He tore a page of the Acts of the Apostles to dry it, smiling, all smiled, there was nothing in a printed page to be revered, the word was one thing, the Word another. Warner did his drying awkwardly: he had but one hand, the other was a stump with five warts on it, a cuff like a pocket covering its shame. Sir Walter filled his pipe for him; Warner said:
- Giordano Bruno alone will not blow out the Aristotelian candle, not so long as the beast that Aquinas chained roams free and tamed in the synods and consistories. He was right, though, to say that we like candles better than the sun because of timorousness. We must smoke glass to look at our father in heaven.
- No perspective trunk, Harlot said, may be trained on him, but -
- Tele, afar, skopein, to see, Sir Walter puffed. The word is ready for you, maestro.
- I thank you. Our studies of the heavens lie elsewhere. Clearly there are stars that are not twinkling jewels set randomly to beautify the night but suns in themselves. These suns we may see, our own blesses or burns, an unmoving orb round which we with the other planets turn. This we know, though some still will not accept it. It diminishes man that he should not be the centre round whom the sun gyrates. The heliocentric - a shocking denial of Genesis. But in our occult law the sun, and I thank Bruno for this, is a universal godhead that, if all would accept, must burn out our sects and their dissensions. Why must we take the Christian faith to the Indians I saw in Virginia? God is enough, the sun his symbol, and it shames me somewhat to think that this that I draw to my lungs is from a place called Trinity. Shatter the trinity, proclaim unity. There would be a word for it.
- Deusism, Deism, Theism, Kit suggested in diffidence.
- What you will, Warner said roughly. Michael Servetus was burned in Geneva for saying the trinity was a three-headed dog. He escaped the Romish and Lutheran burners to end up in flames lighted by Jack Calvin. But I see his contention thus. There is Aristotelian stasis in the trinity. It is not needed.
- You would say that Jesus Christ is not needed? Sir Walter asked.
The Wizard Earl looked comically about the chamber, mapped with strange regions and rivers, as though a spy of the Privy Council might lurk disguised as an astrolabe. He said:
- In a sense for God to come to earth is a great poem. It bewilders and yet reassures with the doctrine that spirit can be made flesh.
- It denies the continuum, headshook Warner. Spirit becomes flesh by a miracle. We do not require miracles. Tom Hariot here can perform more miracles than ever Moses did, if we secularate or secularise a miracle into a new wonder that is nevertheless explained by reason. By the continuum I mean the flow of one thing into another. The contradictions that Bruno wished to purge are either end of a linear continuity.
- Bruno, the Earl said, taught that opposites are reconciled in heaven.
- He did not mean the Christian heaven, Hariot said, he meant a mystical region that the enquiring brain may yet encompass.
- Back to Servetus, Warner said in impatience. He encountered a world of stasis, with the blood of the body an unmoving cylinder. He saw the blood of the arteries and the blood of the veins, for he was a physician that observed and closely, and he saw how one became the other through the strange work of the capillaries. It seemed to him that, if there were a Holy Trinity as the churches taught, this must be unified through a manner of capillary action, Father merging into Son and both into Holy Ghost. So God is motile as the blood is. Bruno was right to turn our eyes towards the great burning circularity of the sun. I hear he is roaring out his Italianate Latin now in Wittenberg. That will shake the pigs of German Lutherans who still revile Copernicus. We here are shamed by his denouncings of our universities fed on costive Aristotle. You were at Oxford? he darted at Kit.
- At Cambridge. Alas, we never had him there to stir our blood.
- And all you learned at Cambridge was Aristotle?
- The Stagyrite as justifier of Christian doctrine, so long as that doctrine was Henry the Eighth's donum morganaticum.
All smiled; he seemed to be accepted. Hariot somewhat wearily said:
- I have been over the edge of the earth where once it was taught a man would fall into nothingness. The mathematics is the key to navigation. It enables us to charter the two worlds that are or were deemed opposed. I mean the infinitely large and the infinitely small. Contradiction or opposition again, you see, and the reconciliation effected through numbers. To add and to multiply one thing, to divide and subtract the same. Would my tables of logarithms be burned as of diabolic provenance? We are beleaguered.
- What are logarithms? Kit asked humbly.
- A logarithm, replied Raleigh, is the index of the power to which a number or base is to be raised to produce the number.
- I am no wiser.
- Nor I, said Sir Walter cheerfully puffing. Let us go back from logarithms to godarithms, pardon me, or God in his infinite rhythms and cross-rhythms and counter-rhythms. I propose that we accept as a needful proposition the existence of a God and ignore what the old schoolmen call the ontological. Ontological confronts hypothetical. Or may one happily live with atheism? Our new friend Merlin has pounded London ears with the atheistical ravings of his Tamburlaine. I am no dramaturge, but it would seem to me that what the creator aims to create is no more than himself through an optic.
- You know nothing of optics, Harlot said.
- I cry your mercy, master philosopher. Is Tamburlaine but the enlargement of Merlin?
- You are truly Merlin? the Earl smiled.
- Merlin or Marlin or Marley or Marlowe. The names of us common people, my lord, are subject to change in the process of onomastic circulation. They are fluid stuff. Nobler names are chiselled on stone or stamped on brass.
- I would as soon be Merlin as Percy. Have you not heard that an earth tremor at Glastonbury has disclosed a marble slab below the abbey's ruins? Post mille exactos a partu virginis annos. This is the warning of Merlin that the empire of Uther Pendragon, which our queen now rules, is due for ruin.
- Leave superstition, Harlot said. Are you not ashamed?
- Well, there will be the prospect of ruin, the Earl said, but I have no doubt that the ambitions of another empire will suffer. What was that about the necessity of atheism?
- Sir Walter is a fine poet, Kit said, but he will not have it that a stage poet differs much from your common striker of the lyre, not that his gift is common, may I be struck down if I say so -
- And who will strike you down? Raleigh smiled.
- I must create men and women and eke create v
oices for them, but they are not my voices.
- If you create them they must of necessity be yours.
- No, Sir Walter. There may be a directive will, Plato's charioteer, but there are many horses and they pull diverse ways. I may dream atheism and solidify that dream in personae that stalk the stage, but it follows not that I proclaim a damnable non credo.
- The soul is many rivers, nodded Warner.
- By whom or what damnable? the Earl asked.
- By the fools that exalt themselves by damning. My Tamburlaine has no argument. He puffs God out like his other enemies. In a sense he believes.
- And do you believe? Raleigh asked bluntly.
- Does belief or disbelief affect God's substance? I would put it this way, that there may be an unmoved mover. But this is not of necessity of intelligible make, no primary model of ourselves. What is termed God may well be a force as inhuman as the sun, and as indifferent whether to bless by warming or curse by burning. It may be a force progressing through change, whose faculty is built into its essence, and coming through the transformation of matter into spirit to a final realisation of what it is. At the end of time, so to say, there may be God realised, but God is till then no more than a conceptus hominis. We are in advance of God in possession of the concept. He or it must wait.
- Well, said Warner, nodding, you are on the right side. You deny stasis.
- Can you deny it wholly? the Wizard Earl asked Warner. You work in the chemistry that was called alchemy in search of solidities that by some miracle of sudden fusion turn into a new solidity. Things are not wholly continuous. And I would put it to Mr Merlin here that in denying a God with characteristics that seem human merely because we are made in his image, we are like him, he not like us, he denies also divine sanction or its opposite for human acts. There may be no great Day of judgement, but all that would seem to matter is whether a man follows good or evil. I put it so, I am not of necessity one that subscribes to the belief that man is mere substance for moral adjudication, but must it be assigned solely to human government the business of defining the good, the evil, the right, the wrong?
A Dead Man in Deptford Page 14