Bertolt Brecht

by Bertolt Brecht

  They were dumbfounded.

  ‘There you are!’ they exclaimed, ‘that’s what we said too. He did nothing but defend himself. That’s his way of winning battles. With your permission we’ll hurry back to the gymnasium. We interrupted a discussion on this subject only to wish you good morning.’

  And off they went, in deeply savoured discussion.

  Socrates lay propped up in his elbows in silence and gazed at the smoke-blackened ceiling. His gloomy forebodings had been right.

  His wife watched him from a corner of the room. Mechanically she went on mending an old dress.

  All of a sudden she asked softly: ‘Well, what’s behind it all?’

  He gave a start. He looked at her uncertainly.

  She was a worn-out creature, flat-chested as a board and sad-eyed. He knew he could depend on her. She would still be standing up for him when his pupils would be saying: ‘Socrates? Isn’t that the vile cobbler who repudiates the gods?’ He’d been a bad bargain for her, but she did not complain – except to him. And there had never yet been an evening without some bread and a bit of bacon for him on the shelf when he came home hungry from his rich pupils.

  He wondered whether he should tell her everything. But then he realised that before long, when people, like those just now, came to see him and talked about his heroic deeds, he would have to utter a whole lot of lies and hypocrisies in her hearing, and he could not bring himself to do that if she knew the truth, for he respected her.

  So he let it be and just said: ‘Yesterday’s cold bean soup is stinking the whole place out again’.

  She only shot him another suspicious look.

  Naturally they were in no position to throw food away. He was only trying to find something to sidetrack her. Her conviction that there was something wrong with him grew. Why didn’t he get up? He always got up late, but simply because he went to bed late. Yesterday he had gone to bed very early. And today, with victory celebrations, the whole city was on the go. All the shops in the street were shut. Some of the cavalry that had been pursuing the enemy had got back at five o’clock in the morning, the clatter of horses’ hoofs had been heard. He adored tumultuous crowds. On occasions like this he ran round from morning till night, getting into conversation with people. So why wasn’t he getting up?

  The threshold darkened and in came four officials. They remained standing in the middle of the room and one of them said in a businesslike but exceedingly respectful tone that he was instructed to escort Socrates to the Areopagus. The general, Alcibiades himself, had proposed that a tribute be paid to him for his martial feats.

  A hum of voices from the street showed that the neighbours were gathering outside the house.

  Socrates felt sweat breaking out. He knew that now he would have to get up and, even if he refused to go with them, he would at least have to get on his feet, say something polite and accompany these men to the door. And he knew that he would not be able to take more than two steps at the most. Then they would look at his foot and know what was up. And the enormous laughter would break out, there and then.

  So, instead of getting up, he sank back on his hard pillow and said cantankerously:

  ‘I require no tribute. Tell the Areopagus that I have an appointment with some friends at eleven o’clock to thrash out a philosophical question that interests us, and therefore, much to my regret, I cannot come. I am altogether unfitted for public functions and feel much too tired.’

  This last he added because he was annoyed at having dragged in philosophy, and the first part he said because he hoped that rudeness was the easiest way to shake them off.

  The officials certainly understood this language. They turned on their heels and left, treading on the feet of the people standing outside.

  ‘One of these days they’ll teach you to be polite to the authorities,’ said his wife angrily and went into the kitchen.

  Socrates waited till she was outside. Then he swiftly swung his heavy body round in the bed, seated himself on the edge of it, keeping a wary eye on the door, and tried with infinite caution to step on the bad foot. It seemed hopeless.

  Streaming with sweat he lay back again.

  Half an hour passed. He took up a book and read. So long as he kept his foot still he felt practically nothing.

  Then his friend Antisthenes turned up.

  He did not remove his heavy coat, remained standing at the foot of the couch, coughed in a rather forced way and scratched his throat with its bristly beard as he looked at Socrates.

  ‘Still in bed? I thought I should only find Xantippe at home. I got up specially to enquire after you. I had a bad cold and that was why I couldn’t come along yesterday.’

  ‘Sit down,’ said Socrates monosyllabically.

  Antisthenes fetched a chair from the corner and sat down by his friend.

  ‘I’m starting the lessons again tonight. No reason to interrupt them any longer.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Of course, I wondered whether they’d turn up. Today there are the great banquets. But on the way here I ran into young Phaeston and when I told him that I was taking algebra tonight, he was simply delighted. I told him he could come in his helmet. Protagoras and the others will hit the ceiling with rage when it’s known that on the night after the battle they just went on studying algebra at Antisthenes’.’

  Socrates rocked himself gently in his hammock, pushing himself off the slightly crooked wall with the flat of his hand. His protuberant eyes looked searchingly at his friend.

  ‘Did you meet anybody else?’

  ‘Heaps of people.’

  Socrates gazed sourly at the ceiling. Should he make a clean breast of it to Antisthenes? He felt pretty sure of him. He himself never took money for lessons and was therefore not in competition with Antisthenes. Perhaps he really ought to lay the difficult case before him.

  Antisthenes looked with his sparkling cricket’s eyes inquisitively at his friend and told him:

  ‘Giorgius is going about telling everyone that you must have been on the run and in the confusion gone the wrong way, that’s to say, forwards. A few of the more decent young people want to thrash him for it.’

  Unpleasantly surprised, Socrates looked at him.

  ‘Rubbish,’ he said with annoyance. He realised in a flash what trumps his opponents would hold if he declared himself.

  During the night, towards morning, he had wondered whether he might not present the whole thing as an experiment and say he had wanted to see just how gullible people were. ‘For twenty years I’ve been teaching pacifism in every back street, and one rumour was enough for my own pupils to take me for a berserker,’ and so on and so on. But then the battle ought not to have been won. Patently this was an unfavourable moment for pacifism. After a defeat even the top dogs were pacifists for a while; after a victory even the underdogs approved of war, at any rate for a while, until they noticed that for them there wasn’t all that difference between victory and defeat. No, he couldn’t cut much ice with pacifism just now.

  There was a clatter of horses in the street. The riders halted in front of the house and in came Alcibiades with his buoyant step.

  ‘Good morning, Antisthenes, how’s the philosophy business going? They’re in a great state,’ he cried, beaming. ‘There’s an uproar in the Areopagus over your answer, Socrates. As a joke I’ve changed my proposal to give you a laurel wreath to the proposal to give you fifty strokes. Of course, that annoyed them, because it exactly expressed their feelings. But you’ll have to come along, you know. We’ll go together, on foot.’

  Socrates sighed. He was on very good terms with young Alcibiades. They had often drunk together. It was very nice of him to call. It was certainly not only his wish to rile the Areopagus. And that wish itself was an honourable one and deserved every support.

  At last he said cautiously as he went on rocking himself in his hammock: ‘Haste is the wind that blows the scaffolding down. Take a seat.’

  Alcibiades laughed
and drew up a chair. Before he sat down he bowed politely to Xantippe, who stood at the kitchen door wiping her wet hands on her skirt.

  ‘You philosophers are funny people,’ he said a little impatiently. ‘For all I know you may be regretting now that you helped us win the battle. I daresay Antisthenes has pointed out to you that there weren’t enough good reasons for it.’

  ‘We’ve been talking about algebra,’ said Antisthenes quickly and coughed again.

  Alcibiades grinned.

  ‘Just as I expected. For heaven’s sake, no fuss about a thing of this sort, what? Now to my mind it was sheer bravery. Nothing remarkable, if you like; but what’s so remarkable about a handful of laurel leaves? Grit your teeth and go through with it, old man. It’ll soon be over, and it won’t hurt. And then we can go and have one.’

  He looked searchingly at the broad powerful figure, which was now rocking rather violently.

  Socrates thought fast. He had hit on something that he could say. He could say that he had sprained his foot last night or this morning. When the men had lowered him from their shoulders for instance. There was even a moral to it: the case demonstrated how easily you could come to grief through being honoured by your fellow-citizens.

  Without ceasing to swing himself, he leant forward so that he was sitting upright, rubbed his bare left arm with his right hand and said slowly:

  ‘It’s like this. My foot . . .’

  As he spoke the word his glance, which was not quite steady – for now it was a matter of uttering the first real lie in this affair; so far he had merely kept silence – fell upon Xantippe at the kitchen door.

  Socrates’ speech failed him. All of a sudden he no longer wanted to produce his tale. His foot was not sprained.

  The hammock came to a standstill.

  ‘Listen, Alcibiades,’ he said forcefully and in a quite different voice, ‘there can’t be any talk of bravery in this matter. As soon as the battle started, that’s to say, as soon as I caught sight of the first Persian, I ran for it and, what’s more, in the right direction – in retreat. But there was a field full of thorns. I got a thorn in my foot and couldn’t go on. Then I laid about me like a savage and almost struck some of our own men. In desperation I yelled something about other units, to make the Persians believe there were some, which was absurd because of course they don’t understand Greek. At the same time they seem to have been a bit nervous themselves. I suppose they just couldn’t stand the roaring at that stage, after all they’d had to go through during the advance. They stopped short for a moment and at that point our cavalry turned up. That’s all.’

  For a few seconds it was very quiet in the room. Alcibiades stared at him unblinkingly. Antisthenes coughed behind his hand, this time quite naturally. From the kitchen door, where Xantippe was standing, came a loud peal of laughter.

  Then Antisthenes said drily:

  ‘And so of course you couldn’t go to the Areopagus and limp up the steps to receive the laurel wreath. I can understand that.’

  Alcibiades leant back in his chair and contemplated the philosopher on the couch with narrowed eyes. Neither Socrates nor Antisthenes looked at him.

  He bent forward again and clasped one knee with his hands. His narrow boyish face twitched a little, but it betrayed nothing of his thoughts or feelings.

  ‘Why didn’t you say you had some other sort of wound?’ he asked.

  ‘Because I’ve got a thorn in my foot,’ said Socrates bluntly.

  ‘Oh, that’s why?’ said Alcibiades. ‘I see.’

  He rose swiftly and went up to the bed.

  ‘Pity I didn’t bring my own wreath with me. I gave it to my man to hold. Otherwise I should leave it here for you. You can take my word for it, I think you’re brave enough. I don’t know anybody who in this situation would have told the story you’ve just told.’

  And he went out quickly.

  As Xantippe was bathing his foot later and extracting the thorn she said acrimoniously:

  ‘It could have meant blood-poisoning.’

  ‘Or worse,’ said the philosopher.

  The Experiment

  The public career of the great Francis Bacon ended like a crude illustration of the specious maxim ‘Crime doesn’t pay’. As the highest judicial functionary of the realm he was found guilty of corruption and thrown into gaol. With all the executions, the granting of obnoxious monopolies, the decreeing of arbitrary arrests and the passing of prescribed verdicts, the years of his Lord Chancellorship rank among the darkest and most shameful in English history. After his exposure and confession it was his world renown as a humanist and philosopher that made his offences known far beyond the frontiers of the realm.

  He was an old man when he was allowed to leave prison and return to his estate. His body was weakened by the exertion it had cost him to bring about other people’s ruin and by the sufferings other people had inflicted when they ruined him. But no sooner did he reach home than he plunged into the most intensive study of the natural sciences. He had failed in mastering men. Now he dedicated his remaining strength to investigating how best mankind could win mastery over the forces of nature.

  His researches, devoted to practical matters, led him constantly out of the study into the fields, the gardens and to the stables on the estate. For hours on end he discussed with the gardeners the possibilities of grafting fruit trees, and told the dairymaids how to measure the milk yield of each cow. In this way a stable boy came to his notice. A valuable horse had fallen ill and the lad reported on its condition twice a day to the philosopher. His zeal and his powers of observation delighted the old man.

  But one evening as he came into the stables he saw an old woman with the boy and heard her say:

  ‘He’s a bad man; look out! He may be a great lord, he may have made his pile, but he’s bad for all that. He’s your master, so do your work conscientiously, but always bear in mind he’s bad.’

  The philosopher did not hear the boy’s answer, for he turned about at once and went back into the house, but he found the lad’s attitude towards him the next morning unchanged.

  When the horse was well again he let the boy accompany him on many of his rounds and entrusted him with minor tasks. Little by little he fell into the habit of talking to him about various experiments. In doing this he did not bother to choose words that grown-ups commonly believe suited to the understanding of children, but spoke to him as to an educated man. In the course of his life he had associated with the greatest minds and had seldom been understood: not because he did not make himself clear, but because he made himself too clear. So he was not put out by the boy’s difficulties; nevertheless, he patiently corrected him when the boy himself tried out the unfamiliar words.

  The lad’s main duty consisted in having to describe the objects he saw and the processes he observed. The philosopher taught him how many words there were and how many were needed to describe the behaviour of a certain thing in such a way that it was more or less recognisable from the description and, above all, that it could be dealt with in accordance with the description. There were also some words that it was better not to use since, strictly speaking, they meant nothing: words like ‘good,’ ‘bad,’ ‘beautiful,’ and so on.

  The boy soon realised that there was no sense in calling a beetle ‘ugly’. Even ‘quick’ was not good enough; you had to state how quickly it moved compared with other creatures of its size and what this enabled it to do. You had to put it on an inclined surface and on a flat one and make noises so that it ran away; or set out little scraps of prey towards which it could advance. You had only to busy yourself with it long enough and it ‘quickly’ lost its ugliness.

  Once he had to describe the piece of bread that he was holding in his hand when the philosopher came upon him.

  ‘Now here you may safely use the word “good”,’ said the old man, ‘for bread is made for people to eat and can be good or bad for them. It is only in the case of larger substances created by nature and not, o
n the face of it, created for specific purposes and, above all, not purely for the use of man, that it is foolish to be satisfied with such words.’

  The boy thought of his grandmother’s remarks about his lordship.

  He made rapid progress in grasping things, inasmuch as it was always something quite tangible that had to be grasped: that the horse recovered as a result of the treatment applied, or a tree withered as a result of the treatment applied. He grasped, too, that there must always remain a reasonable doubt as to whether the observed changes could really be owed to these measures. The boy scarcely took in the scientific significance of the great Bacon’s mode of thought, but the manifest utility of all these undertakings fired him with enthusiasm.

  This was how he understood the philosopher: a new era had dawned for the world. Mankind was enlarging its knowledge almost daily. And all knowledge was for the advancement of well-being and of human happiness. Science was the leading force. Science investigated the universe, everything that existed on earth – plants, animals, soil, water, air – so that greater use could be extracted from it. The important thing was not what you believed, but what you knew. People believed far too much and knew far too little. So one had to test everything, oneself, with one’s hands, and speak only of things seen with one’s own eyes and that could be of some use.

  That was the new teaching and ever more people turned towards it, ready and eager to undertake the new tasks.

  Books played a big part in this, even though there might be many bad ones. It was quite clear to the boy that he must find his way to books if he wanted to be among those who were undertaking the new tasks.

  Naturally he never came within reach of the library in the house. He had to wait for his lordship at the stables. The most he could do, if the old man had not appeared for several days, was to come across him in the park. Nevertheless, his curiosity about the study, where every night a lamp burnt late, waxed ever greater. From a hedge facing the room he could catch a glimpse of bookshelves.