Caliban to the Audience

   If now, having dismissed your hired impersonators with verdicts ranging from the laudatory orchid to the disgusted and disgusting egg, you ask and, of course, notwithstanding the conscious fact of his irrevocable absence, you instinctively do ask for our so good, so great, so dead author to stand before the finally lowered curtain and take his shyly responsible bow for this, his latest, ripest production, it is I–my reluctance is, I can assure you, co-equal with your dismay–who will always loom thus wretchedly into your confused picture, for, in default of the all-wise, all-explaining master you would speak to, who else at least can, who else indeed must respond to your bewildered cry, but its very echo, the begged question you would speak to him about.

⁕  ⁕  ⁕

   We must own [for the present I speak your echo] to a
nervous perplexity not unmixed, frankly, with downright
resentment. How can we grant the indulgence for which in
his epilogue your personified type of the creative so lamely,
tamely pleaded? Imprisoned, by you, in the mood doubtful,
loaded, by you, with distressing embarrassments, we are, we
submit, in no position to set anyone free.
   Our native Muse, heaven knows and heaven be praised, is
not exclusive. Whether out of the innocence of a childlike
heart to whom all things are pure, or with the serenity of a
status so majestic that the mere keeping up of tones and ap-
pearances, the suburban wonder as to what the strait-laced
Unities might possibly think, or sad sour Probability possibly
say, are questions for which she doesn't because she needn't,
she hasn't in her lofty maturity any longer to care a rap, she
invites, dear generous-hearted creature that she is, just tout
le monde to drop in at any time so that her famous, memo-
rable, sought-after evenings present to the speculative eye an
ever-shining, never-tarnished proof of her amazing unheard-
of power to combine and happily contrast, to make every
shade of the social and moral palette contribute to the gen-
eral richness, of the skill, unapproached and unattempted
by Grecian aunt or Gallic sister, with which she can skate
full tilt toward the forbidden incoherence and then, in the
last split second, on the shuddering edge of the bohemian
standardless abyss effect her breathtaking triumphant turn.
   No timid segregation by rank or taste for her, no prudent
listing into those who will, who might, who certainly would
not get on, no nicely graded scale of invitations to heroic
formal Tuesdays, young comic Thursdays, al fresco farcical
Saturdays. No, the real, the only test of the theatrical as of
the gastronomic, her practice confidently wagers, is the
mixed perfected brew.
   As he looks in on her, so marvellously at home with all her
cozy swarm about her, what accents will not assault the new
arrival's ear, the magnificent tropes of tragic defiance and
despair, the repartee of the high humour, the pun of the
very low, cultured drawl and manly illiterate bellow, yet all
of them gratefully doing their huge or tiny best to make the
party go?
   And if, assured by her smiling wave that of course he may,
he should presently set out to explore her vast and rambling
mansion, to do honour to its dear odd geniuses of local con-
venience and proportion, its multiplied deities of mysterious
stair and interesting alcove, not one of the laughing groups
and engrossed warmed couples that he keeps "surprising❞—
the never-ending surprise for him is that he doesn't seem
to—but affords some sharper instance of relations he would
have been the last to guess at, choleric prince at his ease
with lymphatic butler, moist hand-taking so to dry, youth
getting on quite famously with stingy cold old age, some
stranger vision of the large loud liberty violently rocking yet
never, he is persuaded, finally upsetting the jolly crowded
boat.
   What, he may well ask, has the gracious goddess done to
all these people that, at her most casual hint, they should so
trustingly, so immediately take off those heavy habits one
thinks of them as having for their health and happiness day
and night to wear, without in this unfamiliar unbuttoned
state-the notable absence of the slighest shiver or not
quite-inhibited sneeze is indication positive-for a second
feeling the draught? Is there, could there be, any miraculous
suspension of the wearily historic, the dingily geographic,
the dully drearily sensible beyond her faith, her charm,
her love, to command? Yes, there could be, yes, alas, indeed
yes, O there is, right here, right now before us, the situation
present.
   How could you, you who are one of the oldest habitués
at these delightful functions, one, possibly the closest, of her
trusted inner circle, how could you be guilty of the incred-
ible unpardonable treachery of bringing along the one crea-
ture, as you above all men must have known, whom she can-
not and will not under any circumstances stand, the solitary
exception she is not at any hour of the day or night at home
to, the unique case that her attendant spirits have absolute
instructions never, neither at the front door nor at the back,
to admit?
   At Him and at Him only does she draw the line, not
because there are any limits to her sympathy but precisely
because there are none. Just because of all she is and all she
means to be, she cannot conceivably tolerate in her presence
the represented principle of not sympathising, not associat-
ing, not amusing, the only child of her Awful Enemy, the
rival whose real name she will never sully her lips with—
"that envious witch" is sign sufficient-who does not rule
but defiantly is the unrectored chaos.
   All along and only too well she has known what would
happen if, by any careless mischance-of conscious malice
she never dreamed till now-He should ever manage to get
in. She foresaw what He would do to the conversation, lying
in wait for its vision of private love or public justice to warm
to an Egyptian brilliance and then with some fishlike odour
or bruit insolite snatching the visionaries back tongue-tied
and blushing to the here and now; she foresaw what He
would do to the arrangements, breaking, by a refusal to keep
in step, the excellent order of the dancing ring, and ruining
supper by knocking over the loaded appetising tray; worst
of all, she foresaw, she dreaded what He would end up by
doing to her, that, not content with upsetting her guests,
with spoiling their fun, His progress from outrage to outrage
would not relent before the gross climax of His making,
horror unspeakable, a pass at her virgin self.
   Let us suppose, even, that in your eyes she is by no means
as we have always fondly imagined, your dear friend, that
what we have just witnessed was not what it seemed to us,
the inexplicable betrayal of a life-long sacred loyalty, but
your long-premeditated just revenge, the final evening up of
some ancient never-forgotten score, then even so, why make
us suffer who have never, in all conscience, done you harm?
Surely the theatrical relation, no less than the marital, is
governed by the sanely decent general law that, before
visitors, in front of the children or the servants, there shall
be no indiscreet revelation of animosity, no "scenes," that,
no matter to what intolerable degrees of internal tempera-
ture and pressure restraint may raise both the injured and
the guilty, nevertheless such restraint is applied to tones and
topics, the exhibited picture must be still as always the calm
and smiling one the most malicious observer can see nothing
wrong with, and not until the last of those whom manifested
anger or mistrust would embarrass or amuse or not be good
for have gone away or out or up, is the voice raised, the table
thumped, the suspicious letter snatched at or the outrageous
bill furiously waved.
   For we, after all-you cannot have forgotten this—are
strangers to her. We have never claimed her acquaintance,
knowing as well as she that we do not and never could
belong on her side of the curtain. All we have ever asked for
is that for a few hours the curtain should be left undrawn, so
as to allow our humble ragged selves the privilege of craning
and gaping at the splendid goings-on inside. We most em-
phatically do not ask that she should speak to us, or try to
understand us; on the contrary our one desire has always
been that she should preserve for ever her old high strange-
ness, for what delights us about her world is just that it
neither is nor possibly could become one in which we could
breathe or behave, that in her house the right of innocent
passage should remain so universal that the same neutral
space accommodates the conspirator and his victim; the
generals of both armies, the chorus of patriots and the choir
of nuns, palace and farmyard, cathedral and smugglers'
cave, that time should never revert to that intransigent
element we are so ineluctably and only too familiarly in, but
remain the passive good-natured creature she and her
friends can by common consent do anything they like with
—(it is not surprising that they should take advantage of
their strange power and so frequently skip hours and days
and even years: the dramatic mystery is that they should
always so unanimously agree upon exactly how many hours
and days and years to skip)-that upon their special con-
stitutions the moral law should continue to operate so ex-
actly that the timid not only deserve but actually win the
fair, and it is the socially and physically unemphatic David
who lays low the gorilla-chested Goliath with one well-
aimed custard pie, that in their blessed climate, the manifes-
tation of the inner life should always remain so easy and
habitual that a sudden eruption of musical and metaphorical
power is instantly recognised as standing for grief and dis-
gust, an elegant contrapposto for violent death, and that
consequently the picture which they in there present to us
out here is always that of the perfectly tidiable case of dis-
order, the beautiful and serious problem exquisitely set with-
out a single superfluous datum and insoluble with less, the
expert landing of all the passengers with all their luggage
safe and sound in the best of health and spirits and without
so much as a scratch or a bruise.
   Into that world of freedom without anxiety, sincerity
without loss of vigour, feeling that loosens rather than ties
the tongue, we are not, we reiterate, so blinded by presump-
tion to our proper status and interest as to expect or even
wish at any time to enter, far less to dwell there.
   Must we-it seems oddly that we must-remind you that
our existence does not, like hers, enjoy an infinitely indica-
tive mood, an eternally present tense, a limitlessly active
voice, for in our shambling, slovenly makeshift world any
two persons, whether domestic first or neighbourly second,
require and necessarily presuppose in both their numbers
and in all their cases, the whole inflected gamut of an alien
third since, without a despised or dreaded Them to turn the
back on, there could be no intimate or affectionate Us to
turn the eye to; that, chez nous, space is never the whole
uninhibited circle but always some segment, its eminent
domain upheld by two co-ordinates. There always has been
and always will be not only the vertical boundary, the river
on this side of which initiative and honesty stroll arm in arm
wearing sensible clothes, and beyond which is a savage else-
where swarming with contagious diseases, but also its hori-
zontal counterpart, the railroad above which houses stand in
their own grounds, each equipped with a garage and a beau-
tiful woman, sometimes with several, and below which hud-
dled shacks provide a squeezing shelter to collarless herds
who eat blancmange and have never said anything witty.
Make the case as special as you please; take the tamest con-
gregation or the wildest faction; take, say, a college. What
river and railroad did for the grosser instance, lawn and cor-
ridor do for the more refined, dividing the tender who value
from the tough who measure, the superstitious who still
sacrifice to causation from the heretics who have already re-
duced the worship of truth to bare description, and so creat-
ing the academic fields to be guarded with umbrella and
learned periodical against the trespass of any unqualified
stranger, not a whit less jealously than the game-preserve is
protected from the poacher by the unamiable shot-gun. For
without these prohibitive frontiers we should never know
who we were or what we wanted. It is they who donate to
neighbourhood all its accuracy and vehemence. It is thanks
to them that we do know with whom to associate, make love,
exchange recipes and jokes, go mountain climbing or sit side
by side fishing from piers. It is thanks to them, too, that we
know against whom to rebel. We can shock our parents by
visiting the dives below the railroad tracks, we can amuse
ourselves on what would otherwise have been a very dull
evening indeed, in plotting to seize the post office across the
river.
   Of course, these several private regions must together
comprise one public whole-we would never deny that logic
and instinct require that-of course, We and They are
united in the candid glare of the same commercial hope by
day, and the soft refulgence of the same erotic nostalgia by
night but—and this is our point-without our privacies of
situation, our local idioms of triumph and mishap, our dif-
ferent doctrines concerning the transubstantiation of the
larger pinker bun on the terrestrial dish for which the ma-
ture sense may reasonably water and the adult fingers fur-
tively or unabashedly go for, our specific choices of which
hill it would be romantic to fly away over or what sea it
would be exciting to run away to, our peculiar visions of the
absolute stranger with a spontaneous longing for the lost
who will adopt our misery not out of desire but pure compas-
sion, without, in short, our devoted pungent expression of
the partial and constrasted, the Whole would have no im-
portance and its Day and Night no interest.
   So, too, with Time who, in our auditorium, is not her
dear old buffer so anxious to please everybody, but a prim
magistrate whose court never adjourns, and from whose
decisions, as he laconically sentences one to loss of hair and
talent, another to seven days' chastity, and a third to bore-
dom for life, there is no appeal. We should not be sitting
here now, washed, warm, well-fed, in seats we have paid for,
unless there were others who are not here; our liveliness and
good-humour, such as they are, are those of survivors, con-
scious that there are others who have not been so fortunate,
others who did not succeed in navigating the narrow passage
or to whom the natives were not friendly, others whose
streets were chosen by the explosion or through whose coun-
try the famine turned aside from ours to go, others who
failed to repel the invasion of bacteria or to crush the insur-
rection of their bowels, others who lost their suit against
their parents or were ruined by wishes they could not adjust
or murdered by resentments they could not control; aware
of some who were better and bigger but from whom, only
the other day, Fortune withdrew her hand in sudden dis-
gust, now nervously playing chess with drunken sea-captains
in sordid cafés on the equator or the Arctic Circle, or lying,
only a few blocks away, strapped and screaming on iron
beds or dropping to naked pieces in damp graves. And
shouldn't you too, dear master, reflect-forgive us for men-
tioning it-that we might very well not have been attending
a production of yours this evening, had not some other and
maybe-who can tell?-brighter talent married a barmaid
or turned religious and shy or gone down in a liner with all
his manuscripts, the loss recorded only in the corner of some
country newspaper below A Poultry Lover's Jottings?
   You yourself, we seem to remember, have spoken of the
conjured spectacle as "a mirror held up to nature," a phrase
misleading in its aphoristic sweep but indicative at least of
one aspect of the relation between the real and the imag-
ined, their mutual reversal of value, for isn't the essential
artistic strangeness to which your citation of the sinisterly
biassed image would point just this: that on the far side of
the mirror the general will to compose, to form at all costs
a felicitous pattern becomes the necessary cause of any
particular effort to live or act or love or triumph or vary,
instead of being as, in so far as it emerges at all, it is on this
side, their accidental effect?
   Does Ariel-to nominate the spirit of reflection in your
terms-call for manifestation? Then neither modesty nor
fear of reprisals excuses the one so called on from publicly
confessing that she cheated at croquet or that he committed
incest in a dream. Does He demand concealment? Then
their nearest and dearest must be deceived by disguises of
sex and age which anywhere else would at once attract the
attentions of the police or the derisive whistle of the awful
schoolboy. That is the price asked, and how promptly and
gladly paid, for universal reconciliation and peace, for the
privilege of all galloping together past the finishing post
neck and neck.
   How then, we continue to wonder, knowing all this,
could you act as if you did not, as if you did not realise that
the embarrassing compresence of the absolutely natural,
incorrigibly right-handed, and, to any request for co-opera-
tion, utterly negative, with the enthusiastically self-effacing
would be a simultaneous violation of both worlds, as if you
were not perfectly well aware that the magical musical con-
dition, the orphic spell that turns the fierce dumb greedy
beasts into grateful guides and oracles who will gladly take
one anywhere and tell one everything free of charge, is pre-
cisely and simply that of his finite immediate note not, under
any circumstances, being struck, of its not being tentatively
whispered, far less positively banged.
   Are we not bound to conclude, then, that, whatever snub
to the poetic you may have intended incidentally to admin-
ister, your profounder motive in so introducing Him to them
among whom, because He doesn't belong, He couldn't ap-
pear as anything but His distorted parody, a deformed and
savage slave, was to deal a mortal face-slapping insult to us
among whom He does and is, moreover, all grossness turned
to glory, no less a person than the nude august elated archer
of our heaven, the darling single son of Her who, in her
right milieu, is certainly no witch but the most sensible of
all the gods, whose influence is as sound as it is pandemic,
on the race-track no less than in the sleeping cars of the
Orient Express, our great white Queen of Love herself?
   But even that is not the worst we suspect you of. If your
words have not buttered any parsnips, neither have they
broken any bones.
   He, after all, can come back to us now to be comforted
and respected, perhaps, after the experience of finding Him-
self for a few hours and for the first time in His life not
wanted, more fully and freshly appreciative of our affection
than He has always been in the past; as for His dear mother,
She is far too grand and far too busy to hear or care what you
say or think. If only we were certain that your malice was
confined to the verbal affront, we should long ago have de-
manded our money back and gone whistling home to bed.
Alas, in addition to resenting what you have openly said, we
fear even more what you may secretly have done. Is it pos-
sible that, not content with inveigling Caliban into Ariel's
kingdom, you have also let loose Ariel in Caliban's? We note
with alarm that when the other members of the final tableau
were dismissed, He was not returned to His arboreal con-
finement as He should have been. Where is He now? For
if the intrusion of the real has disconcerted and incommoded
the poetic, that is a mere bagatelle compared to the damage
which the poetic would inflict if it ever succeeded in intrud-
ing upon the real. We want no Ariel here, breaking down
our picket fences in the name of fraternity, seducing our
wives in the name of romance, and robbing us of our sacred
pecuniary deposits in the name of justice. Where is Ariel?
What have you done with Him? For we won't, we daren't
leave until you give us a satisfactory answer.
 
                     ⁕    ⁕    ⁕

   Such (let me cease to play your echo and return to my
officially natural role)-such are your questions, are they
not, but before I try to deal with them, I must ask for your
patience, while I deliver a special message for our late author
to those few among you, if indeed there be any—I have
certainly heard no comment yet from them-who have
come here, not to be entertained but to learn; that is, to any
gay apprentice in the magical art who may have chosen this
specimen of the prestidigitatory genus to study this evening
in the hope of grasping more clearly just how the artistic
contraption works, of observing some fresh detail in the
complex process by which the heady wine of amusement
is distilled from the grape of composition. The rest of you
I must beg for a little while to sit back and relax as the re-
marks I have now to make do not concern you; your turn
will follow later.