NIETZSCHE AND SOCRATES IN
M IESSINA
713
edick says less than he knows: "Prince, thou art sad; get thee a wife,
get thee a wife. There is no staff more reverend than one tipp'd with
hom." The laughter is honorable because it issues under the stroke
of humility: "In brief, since I do purpose to marry, I will think
nothing to any purpose that the world can say against it, for man is
a giddy thing, and this is my conclusion." So Benedick puts aside the
Prince; so Socrates put aside Crito. The Philistine values of Messina
have been transvalued not by the destroyer but by the faun who has
been, for a moment, transfigured into the Revolutionary Simpleton.
Nietzsche was right, after all, that our deepest insights will appear as
follies. But he was wrong in adding that they may also appear as
crunes.
IV
The fool in Dostoevsky- the idiot- may occupy an extremity of
crime and anguish that is almost Nietzschean. Or the Fool in
Lear
may occupy for a while the Socratic extreme, with its insights beyond
the confusions of the world. Their suffering is a vocation, like Kafka's;
it
is not a discipline. Neither has the truly comic advantage of the
Meredithian faun, the final exemption from pain after
his
recognition.
This advantage, which Beatrice and Benedick enjoy, is the advantage
of comedy as a political
art.
We have lately accepted the clown as
a religious impersonator-the fool of God, the visionary Innocent
like Friar Juniper or St. Francis himself. The wrestlers with Christ
have been presented as simpletons: Bloy, Rouault, Rimbaud, Kafka,
Dostoevsky, and all the possessed whose helplessness before the world
is
wisdom before God. We have forgotten that the fool, the clown,
does not necessarily wrestle with God or seek a faith; he is the original
human comedy, the primal human innocence. The philosophic clown
Socrates possessed a wisdom radically secular: "if you ask me what
kind of wisdom, I reply, such wisdom as is attainable by man." He
did
not deny the gods, but knew that they are distant. The comic
spirit is most solicitous in its secular observations, in its perspective
upon the human condition; in the discovery, shall we say, by the
eiron
that he himself, like the other men in Messina, is a giddy thing.
