NIETZSCHE AND SOCRATES IN t ..nSSINA
711
wholly utterable. This metamorphosis is the
reductio ad absurdum
of
heresy, not unlike the tragic learning through suffering. In the So–
cratic drama this recognition occurs before his death; the skeptic
must .at last decide concerning the immortality of the soul. Mter the
customary beliefs have been reviewed, he is goaded into accepting
an ultimate challenge in which his own soul is the stake of the argu–
ment. In this extremity, and with a hesitating confidence in human
reason, he commits himself to the dim Orphic myth of immortality.
The tempter has attained
his
illumination; the satyr's mask has fallen.
But the comedy is not done. Socrates' last words are equivocal-a
tribute to a minor deity, the god of physicians: "Crito, I owe a cock
to Asclepius. Will you remember to pay the debt?" Socrates paying
a cock to Asclepius! This is either expiation, or the final tender irony
of the faun. We shall never know which.
The satiric mask falls quickly from Beatrice and Benedick. When
the situation in Messina hangs between farce and tragedy-between
the devices of Don Pedro as Lord of Misrule, and the devices of Don
John as immoralist-we discover in Benedick the same wasted pity of
which Mercutio, that other blasphemer, is capable. "Alas, poor hurt
fow!!" remarks Benedick when he supposes that Claudio has been
robbed of Hero by Don Pedro's wooing. "Now will he creep into
sedges." The eavesdropping in Leonato's orchard, when by pre–
arrangement Benedick and Beatrice overhear themselves accused of
inhumanity, begins the discipline of suffering, the chastising of these
comic fauns, whose virtue, according to the Socratic paradox, is a
reflex of their innocence and whose humiliation is a warrant of their
integrity. The triumph of comedy over farce, and over the Nietzschean
dialectic, is the sudden realization of Benedick, then of Beatrice, "I
must not seem proud. Happy are they that hear their detractions and
can put them to mending." So they are reduced, and will be horribly
in love; the world must be peopled. Benedick is not as he has been:
"When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live
till
I were married." And Beatrice will tame her wild heart to Ben–
edick's loving hand. The fauns are .as pitiful and as helpless as Mal–
volia-"Alas, poor fool, how have they baffled thee!"
In one of his confessional moments Wordsworth (who was no
comic faun) explained "A deep distress hath humanized my soul."
This is the humanization that can occur in comedy, by a comic pathos.
