There seems to be a cycle: a period of brutishness, a conquering of the brutish energy by intelligence, a flowering of the intelligence, then a fizzling down into nervous fuss. The befja belongs to the period when the brute force is conquered by wit and intelligence, but is not extinguished. It is a form of revenge taken by wit on the self-centred physical fellow. The beffe are sometimes simply repulsive. But on the whole it is a sport for spurring up the sluggish intelligence, or taming the forward brute. If a man was a bit fat and simple, but especially if he overflowed in physical self-assertion, was importunate, pedantic, hypocritical, ignorant, all infallible signs of self-centred physical egoism, then the wits marked him down as a prey. He was made the victim of some beffa. This put the fear of God into him and into his like. He and his lot did not dare to assert themselves, their pedantry or self-importance or ignorance or brutality or hypocrisy, so flagrantly. Chastened, they learned better manners. And so civilization moves on, wit and intelligence taking their revenge on insolent animal spirits, till the animal spirits are cowed, and wit and intelligence become themselves insolent, then feeble, then silly, then null, as we see during the latter half of the sixteenth century, and the first half of the seventeenth, even in Florence and Rome.
Like all other human corrective measures the beffa was often cruelly unjust and degenerated into a mere lust for sporting with a victim. Nimble wits, which had been in suppression during the preceding centuries, now rose up to take a cruel revenge on the somewhat fat and slower-witted citizen.
It is said that the Brunelleschi, who built the Cathedral dome in Florence, played the cruel and unjustified beffa on the Fat Carpenter, in the well-known story of that name. Here, the Magnificent Lorenzo plays a joke almost as unjustifiable and cruel, on Doctor Manente. All Florence rings with joy over the success of these terrific pieces of horse-play. The gentle Boccaccio tries to record such jokes with gusto. Nobody seems to have pitied the victim. Doctor Manente certainly never pitied himself; there is that to his credit, vastly: when we think how a modern would howl to the world at large. No, they weren’t sorry for themselves — they were tough without being hard-boiled. The courage of life is splendid in them. We badly need some of it today, in this self-pitying age when we are so sorry for ourselves that we have to be soothed by art as by candy. Renaissance art has some of its roots in the cruel beffa — you can see it even in Botticelli’s Spring: it is glaring in Michelangelo. Michelangelo struck his languishing Adam high on the Sistine ceiling for safety, for in Florence they’d have played a rare beffa on that chap.
So we have the story of Doctor Manente, history alive and kicking, instead of dead and mumified. It should be given to every student of that great period, the Italian Renaissance — and who is not a student of the period.
Whether the joke was ever played by the Magnificent, we may ask. Thin-skinned moderns will certainly shudder and say: No! The real historian will say: It is possible, but hardly probable! The artist will say: It sounds so true, it must be true! Meanwhile someone ought to annotate Lasca, and verify his allusions where possible.
I.asca means Roach, or some little fish like that. It was the nickname of Anton Francesco Grazzini, who was born in Florence in March 1504, just twelve years after the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent, which took place in 1492. Lasca arranged his stories, after the manner of Boccaccio, in three Suppers, and the Story of Doctor Manente is the only one we have complete from the third and Last Supper. The stories of the Second Supper and those of the First Supper, will occupy two volumes following on this one, and in the final volume will be included a study of Lasca. his life and his work.
The Privately Printed Edition of Pansies, by D. H. Lawrence
This little bunch of fragments is offered as a bunch of pensees, anglice pansies; a handful of thoughts. Or, if you will have the other derivation of pansy, from panser, to dress or soothe a wound, these are my tender administrations to the mental and emotional wounds we suffer from. Or you can have heartsease if you like, since the modern heart could certainly do with it.
Each little piece is a thought; not a bare idea or an opinion or a didactic statement, but a true thought, which comes as much from the heart and the genitals as from the head. A thought, with its own blood of emotion and instinct running in it like the fire in a fire-opal, if I may be so bold. Perhaps if you hold up my pansies properly to the light, they may show a running vein of fire. At least, they do not pretend to be half-baked lyrics or melodies in American measure. They are thoughts which run through the modern mind and body, each having its own separate existence, yet each of them combining with all the others to make up a complete state of mind.
It suits the modern temper better to have its state of mind made up of apparently irrelevant thoughts that scurry in different directions, yet belong to the same nest; each thought trotting down the page like an independent creature, each with its own small head and tail, trotting its own little way, then curling up to sleep. We prefer it, at least the young seem to prefer it to those solid blocks of mental pabulum packed like bales in the pages of a proper heavy book. Even we prefer it to those slightly didactic opinions and slices of wisdom which are laid horizontally across the pages of Pascal’s Pensees or La Bruyere’s Caracleres, separated only by pattes de mouches, like faint sprigs of parsley. Let every pensee trot on its own little paws, not be laid like a cutlet trimmed with a patte de rnouche.
Live and let live, and each pansy will tip you its separate wink. The fairest thing-in nature, a flower, still has its roots in earth and manure; and in the perfume there hovers still the faint strange scent of earth, the under-earth in all its heavy humidity and darkness. Certainly it is so in pansy-scent, and in violet-scent; mingled with the blue of the morning the black of the corrosive humus. Else the scent would be just sickly sweet.
So it is: we all have our roots in earth. And it is our roots that now need a little attention, need the hard soil eased away from them, and softened so that a little fresh air can come to them, and they can breathe. For by pretending to have no roots, we have trodden the earth so hard over them that they are starving and stifling below the soil. We have roots, and our roots are in the sensual, instinctive and intuitive body, and it is here we need fresh air of open consciousness.
I am abused most of all for using the so-called “obscene” words. Nobody quite knows what the word “obscene” itself means, or what it is intended to mean: but gradually all the old words that belong to the body below the navel, have come to be judged obscene. Obscene means today that the policeman thinks he has a right to arrest you, nothing else.
Myself, I am mystified at this horror over a mere word, a plain simple word that stands for a plain simple thing. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God and the Word was with God.” If that is true, then we are very far from the beginning. When did the Word “fall”? When did the Word become unclean “below the navel”? Because today, if you suggest that the word arse was in the beginning and was God and was with God, you will just be put in prison at once. Though a doctor might say the same of the word ischial tuberosity, and all the old ladies would piously murmur “Quite!” Now that sort of thing is idiotic and humiliating. Whoever the God was that made us, He made us complete. He didn’t stop at the navel and leave the rest to the devil. It is too childish. And the same with the Word which is God. If the Word is God — which in the sense of the human it is — then you can’t suddenly say that all the words which belong below the navel are obscene. The word arse is as much god as the word face. It must be so, otherwise you cut off your god at the waist.
What is obvious is that the words in these cases have been dirtied by the mind, by unclean mental associations. The words themselves are clean, so are the things to which they apply. But the mind drags in a filthy association, calls up some repulsive emotion. Well, then, cleanse the mind, that is the real job. It is the mind which is the Augean stables, not language. The word arse is clean enough. Even the part of the body it refers to is
just as much me as my hand and my brain are me. It is not for me to quarrel with my own natural make-up. If I am, I am all that I am. But the impudent and dirty mind won’t have it. It hates certain parts of the body, and makes the words representing these parts scapegoats. It pelts them out of the consciousness with filth, and there they hover, never dying, never dead, slipping into the consciousness again unawares, and pelted out again with filth, haunting the margins of the consciousness like jackals or hyenas. And they refer to parts of our own living bodies, and to our most essential acts. So that man turns himself into a thing of shame and horror. And his consciousness shudders with horrors that he has made for himself.
That sort of thing has got to stop. We can’t have the consciousness haunted any longer by repulsive spectres which are no more than poor simple scapegoat words representing parts of man himself; words that the cowardly and unclean mind has driven out into the limbo of the unconscious, whence they return upon us looming and magnified out of all proportion, frightening us beyond all reasons. We must put an end to that. It is the self divided against itself most dangerously. The simple and natural “obscene” words must be cleaned up of all their depraved fear-associations, and readmitted into the consciousness to take their natural place. Now they are magnified out of all proportion, so is the mental fear they represent. We must accept the word arse as we accept the word face, since arses we have and always shall have. We can’t start cutting off the buttocks of unfortunate mankind, like the ladies in the Voltaire story, just to fit the mental expulsion of the word.
This scapegoat business does the mind itself so much damage. There is a poem of Swift’s which should make us pause. It is written to Celia, his Celia — and every verse ends with the mad, maddened refrain: “But — Celia, Celia, Celia shits!” Now that, stated baldly, is so ridiculous it is almost funny. But when one remembers the gnashing insanity to which the great mind of Swift was reduced by that and similar thoughts, the joke dies away. Such thoughts poisoned him, like some terrible constipation. They poisoned his mind. And why, in heaven’s name? The fact cannot have troubled him, since it applied to himself and to all of us. It was not the fact that Celia shits which so deranged him, it was the thought. His mind couldn’t bear the thought. Great wit as he was, he could not see how ridiculous his revulsions were. His arrogant mind overbore him. He couldn’t even see how much worse it would be if Celia didn’t shit. His physical sympathies were too weak, his guts were too cold to sympathize with poor Celia in her natural functions. His insolent and sicklily squeamish mind just turned her into a thing of horror, because she was merely natural and went to the w.c. It is monstrous! One feels like going hack across all the years to poor Celia, to say to her: It’s all right, don’t you take any notice of that mental lunatic.
And Swift’s form of madness is very common today. Men with cold guts and over-squeamish minds are always thinking those things and squirming. Wretched man is the victim of his own little revulsions, which he magnifies into great horrors and terrifying taboos. We are all savages, we all have taboos. The Australian black may have the kangaroo for his taboo. And then he will probably die of shock and terror if a kangaroo happens to touch him. Which is what I would call a purely unnecessary death. But modern men have even more dangerous taboos. To us, certain words, certain ideas are taboo, and if they come upon us and we can’t drive them away, we die or go mad with a degraded sort of terror. Which is what happened to Swift. He was such a great wit. And the modern mind altogether is falling into this form of degraded taboo-insanity. I call it a waste of sane human consciousness. But it is very dangerous, dangerous to the individual and utterly dangerous to society as a whole. Nothing is so fearful in a mass-civilization like ours as a mass-insanity.
The remedy is, of course, the same in both cases: lift off the taboo. The kangaroo is a harmless animal, the word shit is a harmless word. Make either into a taboo, and it becomes more dangerous. The result of taboo is insanity. And insanity, especially mob-insanity, mass-insanity, is the fearful danger that threatens our civilization. There are certain persons with a sort of rabies, who live only to infect the mass. If the young do not watch out, they will find themselves, before so very many years are past, engulfed in a howling manifestation of mob-insanity, truly terrifying to think of. It will be better to be dead than to live to see it. Sanity, wholeness, is everything. In the name of piety and purity, what a mass of disgusting insanity is spoken and written. We shall have to fight the mob, in order to keep sane, and to keep society sane.
The Grand Inquisitor, by F. M. Dostoievsky
It is a strange experience, to examine one’s reaction to a book over a period of years. I remember when I first read The Brothers Karamazov, in 1913, how fascinated yet unconvinced it left me. And I remember Middleton Murry saying to me: “Of course the whole clue to Dostoievsky is in that Grand Inquisitor story.” And I remember saying: “Why? It seems to me just rubbish.”
And it was true. The story seemed to me just a piece of showing off: a display of cynical-satanical pose which was simply irritating. The cynical-satanical pose always irritated me, and I could see nothing else in that black-a-vised Grand Inquisitor talking at Jesus at such length. I just felt it was all pose; he didn’t really mean what he said; he was just showing off in blasphemy.
Since then I have read The Brothers Karamazov twice, and each time found it more depressing because, alas, more drearily true to life. At first it had been lurid romance. Now I read The Grand Inquisitor once more, and my heart sinks right through my shoes. I still see a trifle of cynical-satanical showing-off. But under that I hear the final and unanswerable criticism of Christ. And it is a deadly, devastating summing-up, unanswerable because borne out by the long experience of humanity. It is reality versus illusion, and the illusion was Jesus’, while time itself retorts with the reality.
If there is any question: Who is the grand Inquisitor? — then surely we must say it is Ivan himself. And Ivan is the thinking mind of the human being in rebellion, thinking the whole thing out to the bitter end. As such he is, of course, identical with the Russian revolutionary of the thinking type. He is also, of course, Dostoievsky himself, in his thoughtful, as apart from his passional and inspirational self. Dostoievsky half hated Ivan. Yet, after all, Ivan is the greatest of the three brothers, pivotal. The passionate Dmitri and the inspired Alyosha are, at last, only offsets to Ivan.
And we cannot doubt that the Inquisitor speaks Dostoievsky’s own final opinion about Jesus. The opinion is, baldly, this: Jesus, you are inadequate. Men must correct you. And Jesus in the end gives the kiss of acquiescence to the Inquisitor, as Alyosha does to Ivan. The two inspired ones recognize the inadequacy of their inspiration: the thoughtful one has to accept the responsibility of a complete adjustment.
We may agree with Dostoievsky or not, but we have to admit that his criticism of Jesus is the final criticism, based on the experience of two thousand years (he says fifteen hundred) and on a profound insight into the nature of mankind. Man can but be true to his own nature. No inspiration whatsoever will ever get him permanently beyond his limits.
And what are the limits? It is Dostoievsky’s first profound question. What are the limits to the nature, not of Man in the abstract, but of men, mere men, everyday men?
The limits are, says the Grand Inquisitor, three. Mankind in the bulk can never be “free,” because man on the whole makes three grand demands on life, and cannot endure unless these demands are satisfied.
1. He demands bread, and not merely as foodstuff, but as a miracle, given from the hand of God.
2. He demands mystery, the sense of the miraculous in life.
3. He demands somebody to bow down to, and somebody before whom all men shall bow down.
These three demands, for miracle, mystery and authority, prevent men from being “free.” They are man’s “weakness.” Only a few men, the elect, are capable of abstaining from the absolute demand for bread, for miracle, mystery, and authority. These are the stro
ng, and they must be as gods, to be able to be Christians fulfilling all the Christ-demand. The rest, the millions and millions of men throughout time, they are as babes or children or geese, they are too weak, “impotent, vicious, worthless and rebellious” even to be able to share out the earthly bread, if it is left to them.
This, then, is the Grand Inquisitor’s summing-up of the nature of mankind. The inadequacy of Jesus lies in the fact that Christianity is too difficult for men, the vast mass of men. It could only be realized by the few “saints” or heroes. For the rest, man is like a horse harnessed to a load he cannot possibly pull. “Hadst Thou respected him less, Thou wouldst have demanded less of him, and that would be nearer to love, for his burden would be lighter.”
Christianity, then, is the ideal, but it is impossible. It is impossible because it makes demands greater than the nature of man can bear. And therefore, to get a livable, working scheme, some of the elect, such as the Grand Inquisitor himself, have turned round to “him,” that other great Spirit, Satan, and have established Church and State on “him.” For the Grand Inquisitor finds that to be able to live at all, mankind must be loved more tolerantly and more contemptuously than Jesus loved it, loved, for all that, more truly, since it is loved for itself, for what it is, and not for what it ought to be. Jesus loved mankind for what it ought to be, free and limitless. The Grand Inquisitor loves it for what it is, with all its limitations. And he contends his is the kinder love. And yet he says it is Satan. And Satan, he says at the beginning, means annihilation, and not-being.
As always in Dostoievsky, the amazing perspicacity is mixed with ugly perversity. Nothing is pure. His wild love for Jesus is mixed with perverse and poisonous hate of Jesus: his moral hostility to the devil is mixed with secret worship of the devil. Dostoievsky is always perverse, always impure, always an evil thinker and a marvellous seer.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 1025