The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

In Lublin lived a great sinner. Whenever he went to talk to the rabbi, the rabbi readily consented and con­versed with him as if he were a man of integrity and one who was a close friend. Many of the hassidim were an­noyed at this and one said to the other: "Is it possible that our rabbi who has only to look once into a man's face to know his life from first to last, to know the very origin of his soul, does not see that this fellow is a sinner? And if he does see it, that he considers him worthy to speak to and associate with." Finally they summoned up courage to go to the rabbi himself with their ques­tion. He answered them: "I know all about him as well as you. But you know how I love gaiety and hate dejec­tion. And this man is so great a sinner. Others repent the moment they have sinned, are sorry for a moment, and then return to their folly. But he knows no regrets and no doldrums, and lives in his happiness as in a tower. And it is the radiance of his happiness that overwhelms my heart."

Falstaff's happiness is almost an impregnable tower, but not quite. "I am that I am" is not a complete self-description; he must also add—"The young prince hath misled me. I am the fellow with the great belly, and he is my dog."

The Christian God is not a self-sufficient being like Aris- tode's First Cause, but a God who creates a world which he continues to love although it refuses to love him in return. He appears in this world, not as Apollo or Aphrodite might appear, disguised as man so that no mortal should recognize his divinity, but as a real man who openly claims to be God.

And the consequence is inevitable. The highest religious and temporal authorities condemn Him as a blasphemer and a Lord of Misrule, as a Bad Companion for mankind. Inevitable because, as Richelieu said, "The salvation of States is in this world," and history has not as yet provided us with any evidence that the Prince of this world has changed his char­acter.

INTERLUDE: THE WISH GAME

Were some fanatic to learn the whole of Proust by heart, word for word, and then try reciting it to an audience in a drawing room after dinner, the chances are, I fancy, that within half an hour most of the audience would have fallen asleep, and their verdict upon Remembrance of Things Past would be that it was a boring and incomprehensible story. The difficulty of judging fairly a printed folk tale, still more a collection of tales* that were never intended to be grasped through the eye, is just as great. Our feeling for orally transmitted lit­erature is distorted by the peculiar nature of the only literature of this class that is still alive—for us the spoken tale is the un­printable tale—but it is possible, even in the smoking-room story, to perceive some of the characteristics common to all storytelling. To begin with, both the occasion of the telling and the voice and gestures of the teller are important elements in the effect; the story that has delighted us on one occasion may, in a different context and told by a different speaker, fail utterly to amuse. Then, the ear is much slower in compre­hending than the eye, far less avid of novelty, and far more appreciative of rhythmical repetition.

Folk tales have also suffered from certain preconceived ideas on the part of the general public. They are commonly thought of as being either entertainment for children or docu­ments for adult anthropologists and students of comparative religion. Children enjoy them, it is true, but that is no reason

* The Borzoi Book of French Folk Tales, edited by Paul Delarue.

why grownups, for whom they were primarily intended, should assume that they are childish. They undoubtedly con­tain elements drawn from ancient rituals and myths, but a knowledge of such things is no more essential to appreciating them than a knowledge of the reading and personal experience of a modern novelist is essential to enjoying his novels.

A religious rite is a serious matter, an act that must be done in exactly the right way in order to secure supernatural aid, without which the crops will fail and men die. A myth almost always contains playful elements, but it claims to answer a serious question—how did such-and-such come to be?—and to some degree or other demands to be believed. But a tale is to be told only if someone wishes to hear it, and the one question it presupposes is, "How are we to spend a pleasant evening?" As the soldier-narrator of "John-of-the-Bear" says:

I go through a forest where there is no woods, through a river where there is no water, through a village where there is no house. I knock at a door and everybody answers me. The more I tell you, the more I shall lie to you. I'm not paid to tell you the truth.