712
PARTISAN REVIEW
The satyr is transformed to the scapegoat, and is sacrificed as oblation
and satisfaction to the disingenuousness of Messina. The faun will,
of course, recover, and re-assume the mask and once more dissemble.
But the dissembling will be more ambiguous, more vulnerable. Mter
such recognitions a cock is paid to Asclepius, and Benedick claims
that he takes Beatrice but for pity. The Meredithian spirits are eman–
cipated by their new wisdom. They will, like Socrates, continue to
speak the worst and act the best, but they cannot maintain their
alienation as ironists. In the Socratic comedy the dissembler finds that
he is a man, a political animal even in corrupt Athens; the satyr is
willing to drink the hemlock; he puts aside Crito's offer to rescue
him
with a renewed assurance that the judgment of the citizens is
inexplicably the will of God and that nothing more can be said. In
Much Ado
the humanization of the fauns comes not with the rec–
ognition of their responsibilities to themselves amid the evasions of
Messina, but with their involvement in these affairs, their duty to
Hero and to justice. Their conversion happens beneath the tragic
pressures of the ceremony that looks not like a wedding, when Claudio
cries out upon Hero. Beatrice, already humbled to the confession "I
love you with so much of my heart that none is left to protest," at
once stuns Benedick with the command that he revenge Hero and
kill Claudio. The fauns are no longer disengaged from their society.
The mockers have become simpletons, and the situation is rescued
from the immoralism of Don John.
As
simpletons, Beatrice and
Benedick cannot now claim even the exemption of the fool.
That Claudio is not killed does not matter. The dissemblers have
performed their oblation to Messina, have made an affirmation more
to be expected upon the tragic scene. Civilization, said Matthew
Arnold, is the humanization of man in society. The exulting smile
of the Meredithian faun is not civilizing in this sense because
it
is the
smile of detachment, the smile of
Twelfth Night,
the springing de–
light and hard pursuit. Aristotle implied that tragedy is a political
art.
Comedy is also political. Henceforth Beatrice and Benedick laugh,
but their cynicism is provably-not conjecturally, as it was earlier–
a mere adjustment to the society of Messina, with which they have
entered into a new compact. They, too, have assumed their roles in
the human comedy, but upon their own terms of integrity. They
have surrendered their immunity. In his advice to Don Pedro, Ben-
