A Resurrection-Day Dinner Party
(Emerson once suggested that a dinner party on Resurrection Day would be interesting if it included as guests Pericles, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Bacon, Franklin, Montaigne, Columbus, and Bronson Alcott. No doubt he would have wished to be present himself, so we have given him a seat.)
PERICLES. It is perhaps just as well that the Greek way of living passed away when it did. In older times it no doubt had a certain beauty, but in my day it required an effort to be a Greek.
SHAKESPEARE. You should have seen, my lord, what it meant in my time to be an Englishman.
BACON. I understand not why you say that, sir, unless you are merely indulging your habit of pessimism, common to disillusioned persons of a romantic disposition. I never found it difficult to be an Englishman.
(The others lift their glasses and sing: ‘He remains an Englishmun-n-n!’ All, that is, except Alcott, whose glass contains only water, and Emerson, who raises his glass smilingly but sings not.)
RABELAIS. What is this? A wineglass with water in it and on Resurrection Day! Pardon, my tall and serious friend, but in what country did your mother give you birth?
ALCOTT. I was an American, sir, from Massachusetts.
RABELAIS.Messe a choux sept? A dish, indeed!
MONTAIGNE. Massachusetts was the place — a village, I believe, Monsieur Rabelais — where your writings were seized and impounded as obscene and subversive of public morals.
FRANKLIN. Massachusetts was not a village, but a province. That was its defect. I myself was born in Boston, its capital, but I left it at an early age.
RABELAIS. And were you pursued?
FRANKLIN. Not then.
PERICLES. I have heard of Boston and was flattered when I was told that my name was not unknown there.
EMERSON. In my time your name was often indeed on the lips of young men there. They believed they could establish in Boston a civilization entirely Greek in its attitude.
PERICLES. And what is its attitude now?
EMERSON. Purely Irish-American, I am told.
RABELAIS. Come, let us fill the glasses again. This talk of water and suppression chills the corridors of my soul. Come, lean Yankee, fear not to stain thy starchy shirt front with a few drops of good wine.
ALCOTT. Thanks, good sir, but I am content with clear water.
MONTAIGNE. But wine, sir, is a vegetable extract, and not an animal one, to which I understand you are opposed.
ALCOTT. It raises the purely animal spirits, however, and ministers only to the baser appetites. Man is spirit and has his home in the absolute. He has no need for material stimulants.
RABELAIS. Here methinks I see the spore of that darkened spirit that hath manifested itself in the teetotal prohibition of wines in thy malefic country, am I not right?
EMERSON. The prohibition of wines in our country was a natural consequence of the cult of the State. Governments are created to prevent things being done; so they eventually turn upon their creators and begin to invade their lives. The tendency will become worse before it becomes better.
SHAKESPEARE. There we have it, my good masters. New World, forsooth! Your New World is no more than the old with a younger visage on ’t, as on feast days an ancient witch might hope to hide her cunning and malignant eyes beneath a mask of pink and smiling beauty. Who would court fever, prison chains, and even death itself to uncover other worlds if they but repeat and stablish familiar woes?
COLUMBUS. You need not look at me, sir. Long before my death I knew that my voyages had merely opened virgin areas for prejudice and rapacity to exploit.
RABELAIS. You called him Hamlet, Messire Shakespeare, but his proper name was Columbus. Sensitive lads like you two should have locked yourselves up in a monastery or have been oftener drunken.
EMERSON. I cannot share the pessimism of my friends Shakespeare and Columbus. Life will endure a lot of ruining. Though it be destroyed in one spot, in another it puts out new and stronger shoots.
MONTAIGNE. And I cannot altogether share the optimism of my friend Emerson. Life is a task that has been imposed upon us for some not to be comprehended reason. But it becomes endurable and at moments even pleasurable when one thing is done and one day is lived at a time.
PERICLES. But why compare human life to a task or burden? Why not as aptly to a tree or river? Trees and rivers do not groan about existence or wonder about the purpose of life.
BACON. We see how everything becomes a question of words. Reality disappears. Before we argue, let us define our terms.
RABELAIS. But then there would be no argument, hence no conversation, hence no life. So I say, on the contrary, let us avoid defining terms. Let everything be words.
SHAKESPEARE. Prythee, what is there besides? What has heaven, full of sleeping or guzzling Joves, chose to fit out puny man with, except words? Would know what is this awesome Reality with which dusty philosophers beguile us? A word!
RABELAIS. Let us have more words, then. More words and better. Let us do less and talk more.
FRANKLIN. There is a platform on which a great party could be founded. As I look back on my former existence, it seems to me that my happiest hours were spent in talking.
(Rabelais begins to sing, ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,’ in which all try to join, including Emerson and Alcott, although they do not know the words.)
MONTAIGNE. That is all very well for an inhabitant of cities. Franklins can always find genial company. But what is your country man to do? He cannot talk to the hills, and so, even when he encounters good company, he cannot use it, having lost the habit of offering conversation.
SHAKESPEARE. I lay it down, none the less, that your peasant knows not genuine solitude. The sun, the clouds, the clods, space itself, all speak to him familiarly. It is in the peopled cities that a man is marooned in a solitude like the Dead Sea for heaviness.
BACON. If there were not cities there would be no inquiry, hence no knowledge. Country soil is only good for corn and superstition.
PERICLES. SO it was in Greece. We drew our wise men, orators, artists, and poets from the multitudes that teemed in the streets. From the country came nothing but hay and soldiers.
MONTAIGNE. YOU forget. From the country came the most important things of all —grain for bread, grapes for wine, wool for cloaks. Where would your urban sage or poet be, did not the peasant toil daily to feed him?
COLUMBUS. This be the question: Is there any place on earth where man is happy and his mind at ease?
SHAKESPEARE. Man, target of supernal besoms, is a spider running around a cooking pot. Every spot where he would rest he finds as hot as the others he has deserted.
COLUMBUS. I would say, hotter than.
BACON. IS it the business of a man to be contented, like a pig which lies down with a bellyful of grain? No, a man’s business is to work, to observe, to discover the reason for things.
RABELAIS. Pigs, those are beings I have often regarded with admiration, saying to them tenderly, Mes frères.
ALCOTT. There is no doubt of the selfishness which resides in the individual pursuit of what is called happiness. To believe that, having accumulated riches, one can be happy, while others are in misery or want, that is illusion.
COLUMBUS. Granting, then, there is no happiness, is there on earth such a thing even as reasonable contentment?
FRANKLIN. For periods, yes.
COLUMBUS. And your recipe?
FRANKLIN. TO work at occupations which one enjoys and which are for the common weal, and afterwards to play; to be alone, and afterwards to join crowds; to have the company of men, and then that of women; to be hungry, and then to eat and drink; to deal with things, and then to think upon abstractions.
EMERSON. A good statement of the principle of alternation, which I myself used to favor.
MONTAIGNE. One thing should be added — to have health like a Miuran bull.
SHAKESPEARE. And one more — to be young.
COLUMBUS. To be young is not to be contented. On the contrary.
ALCOTT. IS it possible that during large portions of your life, Señor, — excuse me: Signor it is, I believe, — you were unhappy?
COLUMBUS. I knew not whether I was unhappy, so long as I was occupied.
FRANKLIN. My restless countrymen used to say, ‘ Let us be up and doing.’
COLUMBUS. That was always in my thought. To be idle used to devour my soul.
MONTAIGNE. Idleness has slain its thousands, but the itch to be doing things has brought men into a pox of troubles.
RABELAIS. There is the truth with a barrel hoop around it. I noticed that I came to no harm as long as I carefully considered each situation as it arose and then did nothing.
PERICLES. In Athens we used to argue as to whether a man was great by virtue of what he did or what he was.
BACON. Did a man ever become great by going off into a corner and abiding alone like a cabbage?
EMERSON. The great teachers all grew like vegetables, until they were ready to bloom and come to fruit.
ALCOTT. Indeed, there is something repellent about a solitary and exclusive concern with one’s own welfare, as if no other thing were important. Hermits are the prey of morbidity.
MONTAIGNE. It is to be remarked that the memory of the great is treasured not so much either for what they were or for what they did as for what they said. Their deeds are often forgotten and their characters no longer matter, but their utterances are treasured as if they were of gold.
EMERSON. A good aphorism will outlive the highest pyramid.
FRANKLIN. I noticed that fact when I was a very young man. Whilst others were collecting pounds and shillings, I collected aphorisms.
SHAKESPEARE. In my own youth I loved them as timid maids love the gnawing of a mouse in the night. Aphorisms and canny saws are clogs with leaden soles which the old delight to give the young for shoes.
MONTAIGNE. HOW ironical it is that your writings should have given birth to more aphorisms than the most ancient sage’s!
SHAKESPEARE. Proof the more that wisdom is scarcer than feathers on a hippopotamus.
RABELAIS. It pleases me to see that all of you are coming round to my view, that nothing matters except words. Archimedes, who was one of my Lord Bacon’s stub-fingered scientists, was esteemed to be clever because he once said that with a lever he could move the world. Why, give me the right words and I will turn it over like an empty hogshead. Yea, send it tumbling down the very Stairs of Time.
PERICLES. I am curious to know what, subsequent to my period of life, men deemed really important. What, in recent ages, have they struggled most for?
SHAKESPEARE. Power.
COLUMBUS. Gold.
BACON. Security.
MONTAIGNE. Leisure.
EMERSON. Peace.
RABELAIS. Food.
PERICLES. And do men no longer crave glory?
FRANKLIN. Yes, but I understand that in recent times it has assumed the form of a continuous desire for publicity.
PERICLES. And to think how we Athenians used to believe in progress! It is true that in my own public career I used to make some compromises, but I believed that in a thousand years men would live grandly.
MONTAIGNE. Progress is a movement like a shuttle’s. If it goes forward, it also goes backward a corresponding degree.
SHAKESPEARE. Some have remarked that the backward movement goes further.
COLUMBUS. It is the more murderous, of a surety.
BACON. Progress used to be conceived of as proceeding linearly from one point to another. It is possible that, the movement is circular, returning, after making its curve, to its original starting point.
FRANKLIN. Suppose we consider the movement as spiral. That at least would permit an upward ascent, however small.
EMERSON. But is not that concept purely spatial? We should do better to consider the movement in terms of geologic time, and be thankful for small meliorations.
RABELAIS. These various movements, careering about like driven planets, make a common man dizzy.
Regard the breast of this fowl. For me that is the only world that exists. Consider this glass of lucent wine. For me that is the universe.
(Page enters, calling, ‘Mr. Pericles! Mr. Pericles!’)
PERICLES. That is my name. What is it you wish, my son?
PAGE. You’re wanted on the telephone, sir.
(All look at each other in bewilderment.)
PERICLES. What does that mean?
FRANKLIN. I would not venture to say for certain, but I could guess it means that our dream is over and that the great hook of life is reaching for us again.
RABELAIS (as Pericles, mystified, throws a corner of his robe over his shoulder and follows boy out). Life! Mother of Pity! Are we never to have done with it? Can it be that even death avails naught against it? Is a man safe not even in Hell?
(He pours himself a tremendous bumper of wine as his neighbors glance uneasily out of the door by which Pericles departed, as men do when they know that a party is over.)