Lysistrata | Page 3

soul. But
the rooster is troubled by no dreams of a divine orgy, no carnival-loves
like Beethoven's Fourth Symphony, no heroic and shining lust
gathering and swinging into a merry embrace like the third act of
Siegfried. It is desire in this sense that goes farthest from the animal.
Consciously, no one can achieve the act of love on earth as a completed
thing of grace, with whatever delirium of delight, with whatever
ingenious preciosity, we go through its process. Only as an image of
beauty mated in some strange hermaphroditic ecstasy is that possible. I
mean only as a dream projected into a hypothetical, a real heaven. But
on earth we cannot complete the cycle in consciousness that would give
us the freedom of an image in which two identities mysteriously realize
their separate unities by the absorption of a third thing, the constructive

rhythm of a work of art. It is thus that Tristan and Isolde become
wholly distinct individuals, yet wholly submerged in the unity that is
Wagner; and so reconcile life's duality by balancing its opposing
laughters in a definite form--thereby sending out into life a profounder
duality than existed before. A Platonic equipoise, Nietzsche's Eternal
Recurrence--the only real philosophic problem, therefore one of which
these two philosophers alone are aware.
But though Wagner with Mathilde Wesendonck in his arms was Tristan
in the arms of Isolde, he did not find a melody instead of a kiss on his
lips; he did not find a progression of harmonies melting through the
contours of a warm beauty with a blur of desperate ecstasies, semitones
of desire, he found only the anxious happiness of any other lover.
Nevertheless, he was gathering the substance of the second act of
Tristan und Isolde. And it is this that Plato means when he says that
fornication is something immortal in mortality. He does not mean that
the act itself is a godlike thing, a claim which any bedroom mirror
would quickly deride. He means that it is a symbol, an essential
condition, and a part of something that goes deeper into life than any
geometry of earth's absurd, passionate, futile, and very necessary antics
would suggest.
It is a universal fallacy that because works like the comedies of
Aristophanes discuss certain social or ethical problems, they are
inspired by them. Aristophanes wrote to express his vision on life, his
delight in life itself seen behind the warping screen of contemporary
event; and for his purposes anything from Euripides to Cleon served as
ground work. Not that he would think in those terms, naturally: but the
rationalizing process that goes on in consciousness during the creation
of a work of art, for all its appearance of directing matters, is the merest
weathercock in the wind of the subconscious intention. As an example
of how utterly it is possible to misunderstand the springs of inspiration
in a poem, we may take the following remark of B. B. Rogers: _It is
much to be regretted that the phallus element should be so conspicuous
in this play.... (This) coarseness, so repulsive to ourselves, was
introduced, it is impossible to doubt, for the express purpose of
counter-balancing the extreme earnestness and gravity of the play_. It

seems so logical, so irrefutable; and so completely misinterprets every
creative force of Aristophanes' Psyche that it certainly deserves a little
admiration. It is in the best academic tradition, and everyone respects a
man for writing so mendaciously. The effort of these castrators is
always to show that the parts considered offensive are not the natural
expression of the poet, that they are dictated externally. They argue that
Shakespeare's coarseness is the result of the age and not personal
predilection, completely ignoring the work of men like Sir Philip
Sidney and Spenser, indeed practically all the pre-Shakespearean
writers, in whom none of this so-called grossness exists. Shakespeare
wrote sculduddery because he liked it, and for no other reason; his
sensuality is the measure of his vitality. These liars pretend similarly
that because Rabelais had a humanistic reason for much of his
work--the destructior Mediaevalism, and the Church, which purpose
they construe of course as an effort to purify, etc.--therefore he only put
the lewdery to make the rest palatable, when it should be obvious even
to an academic how he glories in his wild humour.
What the academic cannot understand is that in such works, while
attacking certain conditions, the creative power of the vigorous spirits
is so great that it overflows and saturates the intellectual conception
with their own passionate sense of life. It is for this reason that these
works have an eternal significance. If Rabelais were merely a social
reformer, then the value of his work would not have outlived his
generation. If Lysistrata were but a wise political