Lysistrata | Page 2

the response to a lesser work which does not call so
finely on the full breadth and depth of our spiritual resources.
I amuse myself at times with the fancy that Homer, Sappho, and
Aristophanes are the inviolable Trinity of poetry, even to the extent of
being reducible to One. For the fiery and lucid directness of Sappho, if
her note of personal lyricism is abstracted, is seen to be an element of
Homer, as is the profoundly balanced humour of Aristophanes, at once
tenderly human and cruelly hard, as of a god to whom all sympathies

and tolerances are known, but who is invulnerable somewhere, who
sees from a point in space where the pressure of earth's fear and pain,
and so its pity, is lifted. It is here that the Shakespearean and Homeric
worlds impinge and merge, not to be separated by any academic
classifications. They meet in this sensitivity equally involved and aloof,
sympathetic and arrogant, suffering and joyous; and in this relation we
see Aristophanes as the forerunner of Shakespeare, his only one. We
see also that the whole present aesthetic of earth is based in Homer. We
live and grow in the world of consciousness bequeathed to us by him;
and if we grow beyond it through deeper Shakespearean ardours, it is
because those beyond are rooted in the broad basis of the Homeric
imagination. To shift that basis is to find the marshes of primitive night
and fear alone beneath the feet: Christianity.
And here we return to the question of the immorality of Lysistrata.
First we may inquire: is it possible for a man whose work has so
tremendous a significance in the spiritual development of
mankind--and I do not think anyone nowadays doubts that a work of art
is the sole stabilizing force that exists for life--is it possible for a man
who stands so grandly at head of an immense stream of liberating effort
to write an immoral work? Surely the only enduring moral virtue which
can be claimed is for that which moves to more power, beauty and
delight in the future? The plea that the question of changing customs
arises is not valid, for customs ratified by Aristophanes, by Rabelais, by
Shakespeare, have no right to change. If they have changed, let us try
immediately to return from our disgraceful refinements to the nobler
and more rarefied heights of lyric laughter, tragic intensity, and wit, for
we cannot have the first two without the last. And anyhow, how can a
social custom claim precedence over the undying material of the senses
and the emotions of man, over the very generating forces of life?
How could the humanistic emotions, such as pity, justice, sympathy,
exist save as pacifistic quietings of the desire to slay, to hurt, to torment.
Where the desire to hurt is gone pity ceases to be a significant, a central
emotion. It must of course continue to exist, but it is displaced in the
spiritual hierarchy; and all that moves courageously, desirously, and
vitally into the action of life takes on a deeper and subtler intention.

Lust, then, which on the lower plane was something to be very
frightened of, becomes a symbol of the highest spirituality. It is right
for Paul to be terrified of sex and so to hate it, because he has so freshly
escaped a bestial condition of life that it threatens to plunge him back if
he listens to one whisper But it is also right for a Shakespeare to suck
every drop of desire from life, for he is building into a higher condition,
one se1f-willed, self- responsible, the discipline of which comes from
joy, not fear.
Sex, therefore, is an animal function, one admits, one insists; it may be
only that. But also in the bewildering and humorous and tragic duality
of all life's energies, it is the bridge to every eternity which is not
merely a spectral condition of earth disembowelled of its lusts. For sex
holds the substance of the image. But we must remember with Heine
that Aristophanes is the God of this ironic earth, and that all argument
is apparently vitiated from the start by the simple fact that Wagner and
a rooster are given an analogous method of making love. And therefore
it seems impeccable logic to say that all that is most unlike the rooster
is the most spiritual part of love. All will agree on that, schisms only
arise when one tries to decide what does go farthest from the bird's
automatic mechanism. Certainly not a Dante-Beatrice affair which is
only the negation of the rooster in terms of the swooning bombast of
adolescence, the first onslaught of a force which the sufferer cannot
control or inhabit with all the potentialities of his body and