SHAKESPEARE AND THE HORSE WITH
WINGS
413
I cite you that passage because here is what I mean about pursuing
the idea until it is tracked down and found, naked and shivering, in
the cave of its own origin. Beneath the surface disgust of those lines
a sort of gibbering delight burns at having put the monstrous idea
down on paper. There are some things, most of us think, that are
better left unsaid. This is simply because we could never say them
properly. You could, like Alexander Dumas, simply shout: For God's
sake take her out and shoot her. But if you are going to anatomize
adultery it would be better to repeat that speech of Lear's. Dumas's
cry is the utterance of a man in anguish: Lear's speech is the de–
liberate enunciation of intellectual horror. And it is this same idea
of horror that sits, naked, in the cave of even Dumas's anguish.
What he could not bring himself to look upon, Shakespeare has
gazed down at, understood, and covered over in the vocabulary of
his
insight and his pity. He has gone so far that he can make poetry
out of the unspeakable categories that other men cannot bring them–
selves to contemplate. I call this the intellectual pursuit of the idea
until it either surrenders or turns into a stone.
This following back of the idea to the ontological cave, this
passion, as I might put it, for baring all things down to the nerve
and the bone, this pursuit of the great originative truths about people
and things, is what, in the end, distinguishes the greatest of poets.
When Nietzsche cried out in misery: God has died, he had thrown
all the disguises off his despair and entered the ontological cave of
origins. The speculative intelligence of the smaller mind cannot enter
here: for such lesser intelligences are concerned with evidence and
proof and demonstrable verification. But the great intelligence at
work on fundamental explorations of the human spirit operates in
a more intuitive manner. This manner is, I believe, a poetic oper–
ation. That tremendous and unforgiveable affirmation of Nietzsche's
is, finally, a poetic and not a theological or polemical proposition.
You can no more demonstrate the fact that God is dead than you
can demonstrate the fact that God is not dead: such truths are per–
ceptive and poetic. And, like poems, they do not offer themselves up
to the examination of the scientific or rational judgment. When
William Shakespeare, emerging from the cave of origins with a
great truth in his hands, shows us the three words:
Ripeness is all-–
when he does this any schoolmaster is at liberty to correct him. Ripe-
