[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.’‘That is so the ointment may be washed away,’ said Harry.‘You shudder at usurpers and rebels but your plays make them very eloquent and persuasive.’‘There’s a devil in all of us,’ said WS.‘We are full of self-contradiction.It is best to purge this devil on the stage.’‘You may purge yourself, forgetting that you inflame others.They are at least logical that say to castigate folly you must first exhibit folly as a castigable thing, and in showing folly you thus cause more folly.Well, you may commit your own share of treason in a play about England’s history.As for treason and folly,’ said Harry, ‘they are but words.’‘You sound like the Duke of Guise himself.That, you will remember, was when we first met, when you were with this Emperor of yours at the Rose.Machiavel,’ said WS.‘I doubt it was poor Kit Marlowe or any other of us poor poets corrupted you.’‘I am not corrupt,’ said Harry calmly.‘I spy corruption in the State.The State is crumbling and collapsing with corruption.The young men must cleanse it.’‘Harry,’ sighed WS, ‘I am ten years older than you—— No, I will not say that, I take that back, there is no virtue of itself in age.Let me ask rather if you would live to my age.’‘Life,’ said Harry carelessly.‘If there is no virtue in age of itself, then to live to be older is nothing.I would do things.If I die doing them, well then — I die.I might have died on this Islands voyage.’‘You acquitted yourself well, I know.You were made a knight.Sir WH.’‘Oh, there are a many Essex knighthoods.’‘But death then would have been honourable.Would death be honourable if it were like the death of that poor Jew, a comic death with the crowd roaring, your flesh pulled aside like a curtain to discover guts for the pulling-out? I mean a traitor’s death.For, mark my words, I see that for you.Nobody will drag this queen off her throne.She will live out her days, and there cannot be many of them left.’‘She will grow older and older and pull the country into more ruin,’ said Harry.‘She mumbles over the farthings in her purse, eating bone-soup three dinners running.And we must lean to her stinking breath, her teeth are all rotted, and prate of her eternal beauty.She cackles, she confounds her French and Italian and Latin, she peers at little stories of love in her bedchamber, drooling and slavering over them.’‘The French Ambassador was full of praise for her wisdom,’ said WS uneasily.‘At least, I have heard so.’‘Aye, you have heard this and seen that, but you know nothing.The Queen is a rotting heap of old filth.I know, I am at Court.What we want from you, Ovidian metamorphosis, is something, play or poem, which shall show what is wrong and what is wanted.Something that shall encourage the young and point the way.A play about some old mad champing tyrant that is deposed.’‘When,’ said WS slowly, ‘I have written poems in the past, I have written them for your pleasure.I ceased writing them when it seemed that you took no more pleasure in poems, even in sonnets.I am not hurt by that — your time was come for taking your place in the world, with little leisure for poetry——’‘Aye, aye, come to your point.’‘My point is that I will write to give pleasure to you still, if you wish it, but only lawful pleasure——’‘Ah, Jesus, our moralist speaks again.’‘I will not write anything inflammatory.I will not make my pen a servant to treason.Oh, Harry,’ he said, pleadingly, ‘do not mingle yourself with these madmen at Court.’‘Am I to go on scraping to a madwoman? And I will not have you continually using this word “treason”.Who are you, what are you, to be warning me against treason?’‘A friend, a lover.I thought a friend had certain rights——’‘In that you say you are a friend and lover,’ said Harry with a kind of prim grimness, ‘you may rightly talk of your rights.First, though, you must prove yourself both by showing duty.’‘Duty,’ repeated WS with some bitterness.‘Ever since I was a tiny boy I have been told gravely of my duty — to my family, church, country, wife.I am old enough now to know that the only self-evident duty is to that image of order we all carry in our brains.That the keeping of chaos under with stern occasional kicks or permanent tough floorboards is man’s duty, and that all the rest is solemn hypocrite’s words to justify self-interest.To emboss a stamp of order on time’s flux is an impossibility I must try to make possible through my art, such as it is.For the rest, I fear the waking of dragons
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]