In Praise of Theatre
Alain Badiou with Nicolas T ruong
translated, with an introduction and notes, by
Andrew Bielski
First published in French as Éloge du théâtre, © Flammarion, Paris, 2013
This English edition © Polity Press, 20I5
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ISBN- I 3: 978-0-7456-8696-7
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8697-4 (pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Badioll, Alain.
[Eloge du thearre. English]
In praise of thearre 1Alain Badioll, Nicolas Truong. pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7456-8696-7 (hardback) ISBN 978-0-7456-8697-4 (pblc)
L Theater--Philosophy. L Truong, Nicolas. IL Title. PN2039·B2313 2015 792.01--dc23
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This book emerged out ofa public dialogue between Alain Badiou and Nicolas Truong which took place on 15 Ju/y 2012 as part of the 'Théâtre des Idées' ['Theatre of Ideas 7 series, a program of intellectuaI and philosophical discussions at the Festival d'Avignon [Avignon Festival}.
Alain Badiou and the Untimely Stage: T ranslator' s Introduction
The appearance of In Praise of Theatre in English translation represents the most recent in a steady succession of publication and performance events related to the theatre of French militant philosopher Alain Badiou. T aken together with the worldwide release of The Incident at Antioch in a bilingual edition, the English publication of Ahmed the Philosopher recently made two of Badiou' s plays available to anglophone audiences for the first time - three, if one takes his Plato Jo Republic as a dramatic work, for which there already exists a precedent: during the 2013-14 theatrical season, Badiou' s "hypertranslation" of this foundational philosophical text was performed to considerable acclaim on the stage of the Théâtre
Nanterre-Amandiers, and plans have long been under way to bring the work to the screen in a film version titled The Lift of Plato. l During the 2014-I5 theatrical season, Ahmed the Philosopher will receive a new production at the Théâtre de la Commune d'Aubervilliers, where Badiou is an artistic associate, and to which his annual seminar, previously held at the École normale supérieure in Rue d'Ulm, was recently relocated. AppropriatelY' Badiou took the occasion of the seminar's first meeting in its updated venue as an opportunity to announce the completion of a new play, a comedy titled Le second procès de Socrate [!he Second Trial oj'Socrates]. 2
This surge of activity surrounding Badiou' s work as a dramatist has been complernented by a growing interest in his theoretical writings on the stage, which, like his plays, have only recently been introduced to the English-speaking world. In 2014, Badiou' s masterwork of theatre theory, Rhapsody for the Theatre, was released in a new French edition with a fresh preface by the author. 3 This second edition followed hard upon the book' s appearance in English translation as part of an edited volume which also brings together several of Badiou' s occasional
writings on the theatre. 4 In the essay "Theatre and Philosophy," included in this indispensable collection, Badiou reflects upon his choice of "a short philosophical treatise" as the subtitle for Rhapsody. Such a choice, he writes, "presupposes that, cutting diagonally across many centuries, there exists a singular relation between the artifices of the spectacle and the severity of philosophical argumentation."5 Expanding upon the theory of the theatre established in Rhapsody, and in his Handbook of Inaesthetics, In Praise of' Theatre solidifies the centrality of the stage for Badiou's thought. 6 In doing so, it makes clear the degree to which the theatre serves - from the early Theory of the Subject, to the in-progress The Immanence of Truths - as the diagonal for Badiou' s philosophical project, sweeping across its systernatic armature like the clin amen of the ancient atomists, and animating its subjective possibilities. In the book' s opening pages, we find the following statement on the significance for Badiou of the relationship between theatre and philosophy in his project:
The theatre satisfies that part of myself for which thought takes the form of an emotion, of a pivotaI
moment, of a kind of engagement with what is given immediately to see and to hear. But l had - l still have -a need of a completely different order: that thought take the form of irresistible argumentation, of the submission to a logical and conceptual power which concedes nothing when it cornes to the universality of its question. Plato had the same problem: he was also persuaded that mathematics proposed an unrivaled model of fully realized thought. But, great rival of the theatre that he was, he also wanted for thought to be found in the inrensity of a moment, for it to be a hazardous yet triumphant path. He resolved his problem by writing philosophical dialogues in which mathematics are discussed, as in the Meno, with a slave met by chance. l myself am not capable of such dialogues, though - and besides, no one since Plato has been. 50, l accepted to be divided between the classical form of philosophy, which is to say great systematic treatises, and the occasional incursion, a kind of joyful foray, into the domain of the theatre.
Like the 2012 ln Praise of Love, the present volume emerged out of a dialogue between Badiou and Nicolas Truong which took place as part of the Avignon Festival's "Theatre of Ideas" series? Given both the significance of the theatre x
for his project, and his conception of truth as inseparable from a certain understanding of the idea, it is fitting that Badiou should have such an intimate relationship with the series, now in its eleventh year. Indeed, the "Theatre of Ideas" takes its tide from the work of Antoine Vitez, a towering figure of the French theatre who staged Badiou's "novel-opera," The Red Scarf, at Avignon, and to whose theoretical reflections on the theatre the latter' s project is deeply indebted. 8 It was Vitez who underscored the theatre' s cap acity, unique among the arts, to become a site for the immanent incarnation of transcendent ideas. In the present volume, Badiou provides his own definition of the idea as at once transcendent and immanent: "The idea," he explains, "presents itself as more powerful than ourselves and constitutes the measure of that which humanity is capable of: in this sense, it is transcendent; but it exists only precisely when it is represented and activated or incarnated in a body: in this sense, it is also immanent."9
Unlike dance, understood as the immanent representation of what the body is capable of without refèrence to the idea, or cinema, taken as the transcendence of the image, ungrounded
in corporeal immanence, the theatre, in Badiou' s perspective, "treats immanence and transcenden ce in the immediate," making it "the most complete of the arts." In its oscillation between the pure celebration of the body' s potential and the spectacular nature of the image, the theatre is the only art which "grasps the relation between immanence and transcendence from the point of view of the idea," making it particularly disposed to the evental emergence of artistic truths. It is precisely this potential of the theatre to becorne "the site of the idea's living appearance" that makes it uniquely capable of illuminating the confusion of the times, thereby orienting its subjects in the obscurity in which they are situated.
If Rhapsody and the Handbook of Inaesthetics established Badiou' s theory of a theatre of ideas, the present volume asks after the ways in which such a theatre mighr be adequate to the particular confusion of our "contemporary, market-oriented chaos." In Badiou's assessment, this chaos consists of two principal perspectives, the first, a nihilistic standpoint which "not only dedares that ideas have disappeared, but adds that one can verywell make do with this absence," and the second, a hedonistic point of view whose themes
are economic liberalism and the endless quest for novelty, and whose effective expression is the rnanner in which its votaries, "ding to the circulation of goods as one might grab hold of a passing train." For Badiou, the mission of the theatre in confused times is "nrst of aU to show the confusion as confusion." The theatre, he maintains:
[... ] stylizes and amplifies, to the point that it produces the obviousness of, the faet that a eonfused world is uninhabitable for the subjeets who make it up, even and especially when they believe that the confusion is simply life' s natural state. The theatre makes appear on stage the alienation of those who do not see that it is the law of the world itself which has lost its way, and not bad luck or personal incapacity.
[... ] 'Then, within this representation of confusion, the theatre attempts to make a previously unseen possibility emerge. [... ] The theatre shows that the situation is certainly desperate, but that, within it, a Subject can make its own luminous law prevail.
A reflection of its examination of the theatreidea' s contemporary status, a considerable portion of ln Praise of Theatre is devoted to the work of practicing theatre artists. Where in his earlier writings on the stage Badiou tends to xiii
restrict his discussion to a handful of "celebrated nanles" - BertoIt Brecht, Paul Claudel, and Luigi Pirandello, to select a few from among his personal pantheon - in the present volume he expands the scope of his reflections to include dozens of contemporary practitioners, from directors such as Jan Fabre, Brigitte Jaques, and Romeo Castellucci, to companies such as MarieJosé Malis's La Llevantina. Each in his or her own way, these artists exemplify the power of the theatre-idea to illumina te today's hitherto unthought possibilities.
In order to understand what a theatre of ideas might offer with respect to the confusion of our times, however, it is not enough simply to consider its exemplars on the contemporary theatre scene. Indeed, one of the features of the present volurne is its incisive analysis of the various ways in which the theatre registers our current crisis of global capitalism, which, according to Badiou, maintains the theatre in its precarious status as an endangered art. Central to ln Praise of' Theatre in this connection is its extended discussion of the contemporary manifestations of what Jonas Barish called the "antitheatrical prejudice": an opposition to or revulsion before the theatre, xiv
whose exponents include J ean-J acques Rousseau, Antonin Artaud, Friedrich Nietzsche, and, of course, Plato. lO
Badiou begins his analysis of our contemporary antitheatricalism with a description of what he calls today's "rightist" conception of the theatre, whose aim is first and foremost "to give the 'general' public what it wants." Exemplified by "cutting-edge" takes on the standard repertoire, and monumental rnusical spectacles along the lines of Broadway or the West End, the theatre' s rightist conception demands:
a satisfYing balance between revisired classics, to which the school groups will come, and spectacular entertainments for a "wide audience" - that is what, for the local authorities, constitures an agreeable dosage. The Cid in contemporary costumes for the high schoolers, rock 'n' roll Cleopatra, stripped bare, for the adults - that' s the way ta make a heavy cultural budget turn a profit.
This rightist trend represents one aspect of what Badiou in Rhapsody caUs "theatre," with a lowercase "t": "an innocent and prosperous rhual from which the Theatre detaches itself as a rather implausible lightning boIt."ll
What is at once most striking and most welcome in the present volume, however - and this in particular where it is destined to be taken up in the anglophone humanities and social sciences - is its discussion of the many ways in which today's theatre is as much under threat on its left as it is on its right. Introducing the more insidious threat he caUs the theatre' s "leftist reactionary conception," Badiou explains:
On the left or leftist side, the contemporary thesis is rather to consider that the theatre has outlived its usefulness, that it must be overcome from within itself and be deconstructed, that any form of representation should be criticized, that one must work toward a certain voluntary confusion between the arts of the visible and of sound, and organize an indiscernibility between theatre and the direct presence of life, to make of the theatre a sort of violent ceremony consecrated to the existence of the body.
In the series of untimely reflections which farm ln Praise of1heatre's center of gravity, Badiou offers a trenchant critique of this leftist antitheatricalism, a phenomenon whose roots in the twentieth century. can be traced to figures such as Marcel Duchamp and Oskar Schlemmer, and one of
whose principal present-day manifestations can be found in the discourse around performance in contemporary cultural studies.
Drawing from theorists such as J. L. Austin, Erving Goffman, and Judith Butler, and from practitioners such as Allan Kaprow and the members of the Fluxus movement, the interdisciplinary field of performance studies was established in the anglophone acaderny of the 1980s and 1990S in polemical opposition to a certain conception of the theatrical stage. 12 Finally incapable of responding in any meaningful way to the vicissitudes of postmodernism, it was claimed, the politically outmoded study and practice of theatre should give way to the emancipatory potential of performance. In this new perspective, the normativizing and logocentric stage would be reduced to merely one type of performance phenomenon among a plethora of others, including performance art and "popular entertainments," as weIl as political, religious, and athletic events.
In its beginnings, performance' s antitheatrical orientation found expression in a series of more or less innocuous assertions regarding the retrograde character of the stage, such as J. L. Austin's
comments concerning the theatrical text' s parasitic relation to language, or Richard Schechner' s prediction that the theatre, understood as the staging of works of dramatic literature, was destined to become "the string quartet of the twenty-first century: a beloved but extremely limited genre."13 Today, however, performance's antitheatricalism has in sorne quarters reached a fever pitch. In a recent interview, celebrated performance artist Marina Abramovié suggested that relegating the theatre to the status of merely one among many performance genres in fact stopped short of the coup de grâce it deserved. "T0 be a performance artist," Abramovié insisted, "you have to hate theatre. Theatre is fake: the knife is not real, the blood is not real, and the emotions are not real. Performance is just the opposite: the knife is real, the blood is real, and the emotions are real." 14
In Praise of1heatre's investigation of the theatre' s leftist reactionary conception takes aim at sorne of the central tenets of performance, resulting in one of the most compelling interrogations of this emergent field to date. As a first exampIe of this critical tour de force, one might take Badiou' s principled dismissai of the calI for the
theatre' s subsumption under a single, "broad spectrum approach" to cultural production. 15 Intended in part to do away with the elitist opposition between arts such as theatre, cinema, or dance, and "popular entertainments," such as musical comedy, pop music, and stand-up, such a leveling gesture would order each as merely one among many diverse expressions of the manifold field of performance, each equally worthy of study, and each equally viable in its emancipatory promise.
Badiou gives no quarter when it cornes to his own definition of entertainment, which, whether in its rightist or leftist expression, he considers an ideological instrument whose chief operation is to pro duce fodder for "the adherents of the dominant obscenity." Theatrical entertainment is, for Badiou, "that which makes use of the visible means of the theatre (the performance, the set, the actors, the 'one-liners' ... ) to reinforce the opinions of the spectators, which are predictably enough the dominant opinions." In Badiou's perspective, the theatre-idea is by definition supplemental in nature. Its capacity to illuminate previously unimaginable pathways in the obscurity of our times depends precisely xix
upon its subtraction from the everyday order of things. Ir is in the context of this evental understanding of the theatre-idea that we should understand Badiou' s insistence upon maintaining the opposition between the domain of art, understood precisely as "the invention of new forms adequate to a distance taken from that which dominates," and the domain of entertainment, "a constitutive piece of the dominant propaganda." 11Ie theatre, Badiou asserts, "demands in particular that one rigorously activate this distinction. "
A related doctrine of perforrnance' s antitheatricalleft interrogated in the present volume concerns the call for an end to the Hnes of demarcation between stage and house, perfornler and spectator. In question here is the assertion that the theatre' s subjective effects are best reaHzed by a physical mobilization of the audience which turns spectators into actors, thereby making "active" participants out of what were merely "passive" observers. In this connection, the notion of the "spect-actor" in Augusto Boal's "theatre of the oppressed" is perhaps exemplary, though this notion is also central to the phenonlenon of the Happening, the work of companies such as the
Living Theatre, and a good deal of contemporary site-specifie theatre. 16
In the pages that follow, Badiou recasts the ternlS of the debate over the theatrical spectator' s alleged passivity. In his discussion of the typically ham-fisted exhortations to the spectator to "participate" - to climb up on stage and join the action, to dialogue and debate with the actors and other members of the audience - he observes that "demonstrations of this type, intended to reseue the spectator from his passivity, are in general the height of passivity since the spectator nlust obey the severe injunction to not be passive." While he indicates sOIne significant exceptions to this trend, Badiou nevertheless maintains that the success of the theatrical perfonnance is irreducible to "an afFected and formally 'participatory' manipulation of the audience," and rather co mes down quite sim ply to "knowing if the theatre is present, if the event of thought takes place theatrically." When the latter is the case, Badiou asserts, the theatre "cannot fàil to provoke subjective transferences, transformations which occur even if the spectator remains seated in his chair."
As a final introductory example of Badiou' s critique of the theatre' s leftist conception, we xxi
might take his rebuttal to the tinleworn accusation of the tyranny of the dramatic text over theatrical stage. Here, the issue turns upon the question of a rnodality of the body liberated from any representational framework. With respect to the theatre, this question announces itself first and forernost in the charge that the vital powers of the performing body are suppressed by the primacy of the dramatic text. In the twentieth century the great thinker of this point of tension is, of course, Artaud, whose call for a new, non-verbal theatricallanguage, "halfWay between gesture and thought," is frequently invoked in the discourse around performance - typically after its requisite routing through Derridean or Deleuzian detours. 17
The calI for the eradication of the dramatic text - like the call for the suppression of the house-stage divide - is symptomatic, in a theatrical register, of what Badiou in Logics of Worlds calls "democratic materialism": the promotion of a correlation of life and individuals whose paradigm for freedom is sexual freedom, which is to say, "the non-interdiction of the uses an individual may make, in private, of the body that inscribes him or her in the world." T 0 demo-
cratic materialism Badiou opposes what he caUs "materialist dialectics," which promotes a correlation of truths and subjects, rather than of life and individuals, and where "it is not a matter of the bond - of prohibition, tolerance or validation - that languages entertain with the virtuality of bodies," but rather "a matter of knowing if and how a body partakes, through languages, in the exception of a truth."18
One of the many reflections of materialist dialectics in the present volume can be found in Badiou' s insistence upon the paramount importance of the dramatic text to the production of theatre-ideas. While Badiou cautions against fetishizing the theatre text, or taking it to be the theatre' s essence, he nevertheless describes it as constituting the eternity of the stage, the symbolic repository which testifies both to the theatre' s having taken place and to the fact that it will take place again. Perhaps more to the point, for Badiou, it is the text that keeps the theatre suspended in its crucial oscillation between dance and cinema. "The text" Badiou maintains, "is the symbolic order to which the theatre hoids in order to handle, in its proper element, the unavoidable negotiations with the dancing body
and with spectacular imagery." lt is precisely this oscillation that makes the theatre uniquely disposed to the idea's evental emergence. If, as Vitez suggested, the incarnation of ideas in the theatre is indexed in the bending of the actor' s body beneath their weight, this has everything to do with the particular manner in which language strikes the body on the theatrical stage. It is in this sense that we should understand Badiou' s description of the actor's body as "a body eaten by the words of the text."19 When, frorn among the figures in his theatrical pantheon, Badiou selects Brecht and Pirandello to represent the twentieth century's "passion for the real," it is because their work draws toward its limits the theatre' s privileged relationship to the operation whereby semblance discloses the exception of the real; for Badiou, it is only in the impasses in symbolization at the turbulent intersections of the theatre' s symbolic and imaginary coordinates that the theatre-idea makes its aleatory appearance. 20 Badiou' s insistence on the necessity of the theatrical text in this sense constitutes a forceful reminder of how easy it is - amidst the clamall E " E ""1 orous c Lor a pure penormance, a t leatre without theatre," or a "postdramatic stage" - for
something of what the theatre actually offers with respect to the real to slip silently out the stage door.
In Praise of Theatre thus describes the movement whereby a new dialectical materialist theory of the stage is masterfully guided between the Scylla and Charybdis of the contemporary threat to the theatre-idea. And while it provides a rigorous assessment of the current menace to the theatre' s right, the force of this text lies in the precision with which it lays bare our conjuncture' s threat to the theatre's left. "Just as one must draw lessons from the damage done by a unilateral and violent politicalleftism," Badiou contends:
one must acknowledge that purely critical experimentation, the idea of an immediate abolition of all forms of theatrical representation, the exclusive promotion of a theatre without theatre - all this cannot by itself constitute a solid orientation for the future of the theatre and its broader relationship to populations from which it remains distant. Taken in isolation as the general doctrine of the "theatre" today, the critical and negative tendencies threaten the theatre because their radicality, as soon as it is established as a dominant orientation, is necessarily destructive. You xxv
know very well that l am certainly not in principle opposed to violence or destruction. But this constant negation of the theatre frorn within itself, obtained, in what is finally a monotonous manner, by a sort of excessive appetite for the real, for pure presence, for the naked, torn, and tortured body exposed onstage in the very violence of its presence, aIl of this combined with spectacular lights, shocking images and a powerful sound system, cannot and must not constitute the whole of the theatre.
It would be wrong, however, ta read In Praise of Theatre as an impassioned defense of a beleaguered stage. In the final analysis, as Badiou puts it, "nothing of what can be said for or against the theatre can escape the theatre itselt:" Perhaps anticipating the in-progress The immanence of Truths and its meditation on the limits of the principle of non-contradiction, Badiou here contends that the theatre - the complete theatre - is "the greatest machine ever invented for absorbing contradictions: no contradiction frightens it. On the contrary, each one constitutes for the theatre a new source of nutrition."
Andrew Bielski
Defense of an Endangered Art
Where does your love of the stage) of acting) and of theatrical performance come /rom?
The first theatrical production that really struck me 1 encountered in Toulouse when 1 was 14. La Compagnie du Grenier [The Attic Cornpany], founded by Maurice Sarrazin, was putting on Scapin the Schemer. 1 ln the tide role, Daniel Sorano. 2 A brawny, agile Scapin, of remarkable self-assuredness. A triumphant Scapin, whose nimbleness, sonorous voice, and astonishing facial expressions made one want to meet him, to ask of him sonle outlandish service. And, of course, 1 did ask this service ofhim, when, in July 1952, 1 played the role of Scapin at Lycée Bellevue
[Bellevue High School]! 1 remember that, at that fateful rnoment when I had to make myentrance and deliver my first line, I had clearly in mind Sorano' s bounding and radiance, to which 1 attempted to mold my lanky frame. During a later remounting of the same production, the cridc of La Dépêche du Midi [The Southern Dispatch] shot me a poisonous compliment by declaring that 1 recalled "with intelligence" Daniel Sorano. It was the least one could say ... But, from then on, intelligence or no, 1 had caught the theatre bug.
Another stage in the disease was discovering Vilar, of the TNP [People's National Theatre], at Chaillot, when the provincial youth that 1 was moved up to "the big city" to pursue his studies. 3 I think that what struck me at the time was the simplicity of the staging, its reduction to a series of signs, at the same time as the very distinctive density of the acting of Vilar himself. It was as if, at a distance from the performance he was giving, he was hinting at much more than he was actually executing on stage. I understood, thanks to him, that the theatre is more an art of possibilities than it is of actualizations. 1 recall in particular, in Molière's Don Juan, a dumbshow he added. 4
After his tirst encounter with the statue of the Commandant, Don Juan, the atheistic and provocative libertine, is of course troubled, though he doesn't at aIl want to admit it: what is this statue that speaks? In the production, Vilar re-entered alone, slowly, and stood silently considering the statue, which had returned to its natural immohility. It was a poignant moment, even though it was a complete abstraction: the character was demonstrating his uncertainty, engaging in a tense examination of various hypotheses one could rnake in relation to an abnormal situation. Yes, this art of hypotheses, of possibilities, this trembling of thought before the inexplicablethis was the theatre in its highest expression. l threw myself th en - and l continue! - into a vast reading. l covered a considerable portion of the world repertoire. l expanded upon the effect produced by the productions of the TNP by reading the complete works of the dranlatists selected by this theatre: after Don Juan, l re-read all of Molière; after Peace, l read aIl of Aristophanes; after The City, all of Claudel; after Platonov, all the Russian theatre available; after Red Roses for Me, aIl of Sean O'Casey; after The Triumph ofLove, all of Marivaux; after Arturo Uî, 3
all of Brecht; and then all of Shakespeare, aIl of Pirandello, aIl of Ibsen, all of Strindberg, and all the others - in particular Corneille, for whom l have a special love, encouraged by the beautiful recent productions of this dramatist by Brigitte Jaques and her theatrical accomplice, the great theoretician and, on occasion, actor, François Regnault. 5
When, later, l wrote a few plays, it was not a coincidence that they were most often based upon older models: Ahmed le subtil [Ahmed the Subtle] upon Scapin the Schemer, Les Citrouilles [!he Pumpkins] upon Progs, L'Écharpe rouge [!he Red Scarj] upon !he Satin Slipper ... 6 If live performances remain the true points of intensity of the theatre, the written repertoire is the aweinspiring foundation, the historical substrate. The theatrical performance embarks you on an emotive and thinking voyage for which the texts of aIl times and places are like the maritime horizon.
When, with Antoine Vitez, then with Christian Schiaretti, l participated directIy in this sort of embarkment, this time as a part of the navigational crew, l felt, almost physically, this paradoxical alliance, this fecund dialectic between a horizon of infinite magnitude - that
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"That you might have a step-dame some of these fine days, you rogue," returned his father, laughing. "What would you say to that?"
"I should rejoice heartily," said Jack eagerly; "for I am sure she would make a good wife, and I love her dearly already. Besides, I should be pleased with anything which made you happy."
"Well, well! There is no question of that matter now," said his father, who was obviously not displeased with the idea. "We must not forget that madam is a born lady, though she condescends so kindly to become one of ourselves. But the question is now not of marriage, but of saving from hanging."
"I will talk to Father William about the matter," said Jack. "I will go to him this very evening. Dear father, I am so glad I have told you all, and that you are not angry with me."
"I could not be angry, son Jack, though I do not deny that I am greatly grieved. I would fain spend the remnant of my days in peace. Not but I would gladly see the Church reformed, and especially some order taken with all these lazy monks and begging friars, who eat honest, industrious folks out of house and home, and carry off silly girls to convents; but I fear your friends are too sweeping. I cannot bring myself to believe that so much we have been taught to receive as Gospel truth is no more than men's invention."
"Only read for yourself, father, and you will see."
"Well, well, perhaps I may, if only to put my head in the same halter with yours. One word more, Jack, because we may have company home and no chance to speak further. How much of all this does Anne know?"
Jack repeated to his father what the reader has heard already.
"I cannot think that Anne would betray me, for all she says," he added.
"I do not know," said Master Lucas, shaking his head. "Anne is a true nun. She thinks all family affections are carnal and fleshly ties, and to be trampled under foot. I cannot I will not think of your mother's daughter, that she would do such a deed, but I hope she may not be tried. But after all, we may be borrowing trouble. Father William makes no secret of his new ideas, nor does Arthur Brydges of his, and I hear my Lord Harland is as open, and he is very great with the bishop. Anyhow, I wish we were well out of the scrape."
CHAPTER XIX.
A SORROWFUL PARTING.
That evening Jack went, as he had proposed, to consult Father William about Sister Barbara.
Father William had lately made full profession of his faith, and preached the reformed doctrines openly in his church by the waterside, whither hundreds flocked to hear him— some urged by personal affection, for Father William was by far the most popular priest in Bridgewater; some from
curiosity, to hear what was beginning to make such a noise and stir; and a few moved by earnest desire to hear and understand the truth. As yet, no disturbance had arisen in consequence of his preaching.
The other priests, indeed, were furious, and the preaching friars thundered unsparing denunciations against the heretic and all who heard demonstrating to their own satisfaction, at least, that he was possessed with ten devils, and would certainly be torn in pieces by them some day. The priest of St. Mary's was an infirm, easy-going old man, of the same school as Father John of Holford, and the prior of the convent was engaged in an active warfare with another convent concerning certain tan-yards and mills which they owned in common. Moreover, it was pretty well-known that the bishop of the diocese was, if not in reality a favorer of the gospel, yet nowise inclined to interfere with those who were.
Under all these favoring circumstances, Father William remained unmolested for the present, and he improved the time by preaching every day in his own church, and instructing in the truth those persons—and they were many who came to unburden their minds and consciences to him.
Jack found him sitting at his frugal supper table, not eating, but leaning back in his chair; and he could not but remark how worn and thin the good man looked.
"You are killing yourself with this constant labor, dear father," said he; "you must take some rest."
"I must work the work to which I am sent, while it is yet day," said Father William. "The night cometh apace, in which no man can work. Unless I am greatly mistaken, this
calm which we now enjoy is like to be of short duration, and I must use it diligently to win souls to my Master, and plant seed which may spring and grow when I am laid low. Besides," he added, with a sorrowful smile, "why should I save the body for the hangman or the stake? I should esteem myself blessed, indeed, if I might but die at my work. But what can I do for you, my dear son?"
Jack briefly opened his business.
"The danger is imminent, as you say," said priest when he had heard the story. "It would be certain death for the lady to return to the convent, and she may be called to do so any day—especially if she be suspected of heresy."
He mused a little while, and Jack almost thought he had forgotten the subject of conversation, when he roused himself from his abstraction.
"I think I see my way," said he. "I know a gentleman's family among the hills, yonder, where I think she would be welcome, both for her own sake and the gospel's. It is a wild and rocky nook—they say the sun is scarce seen there in winter, for the height of the hills which surround it—and there are abundance of places where, if need were, an army might be concealed. I shall be going that way tomorrow, and will see the lady and break the matter to her."
Sir William was as good as his word, and in two or three days, he told Jack the result of his mission. The lady was overjoyed at the thought of having such a companion in her solitude and such a teacher for her daughters, and the squire was ready to afford succor to any one who came to him in the name of the gospel.
"They are but rustic folk," said the priest, "and, though of gentle blood, far behind our town burghers in refinement
and luxury. Sister Barbara must be content to rough it not a little, but that is a small matter. Any home, however rude, is better than a prison."
The result of these negotiations was communicated to Sister Barbara. At first she was distressed at the thought of leaving her school and her new friends, but a little consideration showed her that flight was the best course.
"I care nothing for roughing it," she said; "the good father well says that any home is better than a prison, and doubtless I can find ways to make myself useful to the lady and her daughters."
"And if this storm blows over, as I still hope it may, you will return to us, dear madam," said Master Lucas. "Truly the house will seem empty and dreary without you. Meantime, let no word of this matter be dropped in the household— before Anne, least of all."
"I cannot make up my mind to distrust Anne," said Jack.
"No person is to be trusted whose mind and conscience are wholly in the keeping of another," said Master Lucas. "I pray you, let me manage the matter my own way."
"So Madam Barbara is going to leave us," said Cicely, a few days afterward. "Father William has discovered some friends of hers off among the hills who desire a visit from her, and she is to go to them. We shall miss her more than a little."
"I hope to return, one of these days," said Madam Barbara. "I am sure I shall never find a happier home than this or a kinder friend than you are, dear Cicely, if I go over the world to look for them; but this lady is very lonely, and she has daughters to educate, and, moreover, there are other reasons which make my going desirable."
"Well, well; every one knows his own business best, and blood is blood—I don't deny that," said Cicely, "and I can't but think one's own relations were meant to be nearer than other folks, for all Anne says about it. But it must be a wild, dreary place—especially in winter."
"The more need for sunshine in the house, and I am sure Madam Barbara carries that with her wherever she goes," said Jack.
Anne heard of the intended departure of Sister Barbara with little regret. There had, of late, been no sympathy between them. Anne felt that Sister Barbara wholly disapproved of her conduct to her father and brother; and dead as she believed herself to be to all earthly things, she could not endure even an intimation of that blame she was so ready at all times to bestow on others. Moreover, she was jealous. It was impossible to live with Sister Barbara and not love her, and though Anne did not and would not take any pains to make herself agreeable or beloved, yet it angered her to the soul, to see another taking the place which belonged of right to herself.
Anne's life, at this time, was one of sheer inconsistency. She was fighting in behalf of a faith in which she, in her heart, scarcely preserved a shadow of belief; she was determined to crush out all earthly ties, and at the same time she was able to endure the thought of not being first in her father's house; and though she had told her brother that she should feel perfectly justified in betraying him, she was yet fiercely indignant at him for withholding his confidence from her. All this inward conflict did not tend to make her the more amiable, and while she revenged upon herself by renewed penances any failure in "holy humility," she was deeply hurt and indignant if any one in the least degree reproved or resented her bursts of temper.
She asked no questions as to Sister Barbara's plans, and hardly returned her expressions of affection at parting, yet she stood at the door watching the party as far as she could see them, and then, going up to her room, she wept long and bitterly—partly over the parting, partly over the disappointment of the hopes with which she had welcomed her former friend, and a good deal, it must be confessed, from mere hysterical fatigue consequent upon fasting and watching for sixteen or eighteen hours.
Jack and his father rode with Madam Barbara to within some ten miles of her destination, when they were met by Mr. Hendley, who gave the lady a hearty welcome, and to her friends an equally hearty invitation to come and see him and his wife, and stay any number of days or months.
Then, seeing the lady mounted on a pillion behind her protector, they took their leave of her, and turned their faces homeward. Taking advantage of a late moon, they had set out long before day to avoid any prying observations or questions from the neighbors, and it was still early when they returned home. As they turned into their own street, Jack uttered a vehement exclamation of surprise, at the sight of a stout elderly gentleman, in a cassock, descending with apparent pain and difficulty from his mule.
"What now?" asked his father.
"It is Father John, from Holford, as sure as you live, father!" exclaimed Jack. "What miracle or earthquake can have brought him so far from home?"
"We shall soon hear," replied his father.
"Yes, if the poor man have any breath left to speak," said Jack, as he threw himself hastily from his own beast. "I should think that doubtful."
"Well, we must give him all the welcome and refreshment in our power," said the master baker, dismounting more leisurely. "Your reverence is heartily welcome to my poor dwelling," he added, addressing the poor old priest, who had dropped exhausted on the first seat. "I would we had been at home to receive you in more fitting form. I pray you to walk into the parlor."
The old man rose with some difficulty, and, accepting the support of Master Lucas's arm, he made out to walk into the sitting-room. Jack ran before to bring forward the easiest seat and place a footstool before it, and then to bring a cup of ale, which Father John drank without a word.
Then turning a lack-lustre and piteous eye upon his cupbearer, he ejaculated—
"Alack, my dear son!"
"I trust nothing unpleasant has chanced to bring you so far from home, father," said Jack, fearing he knew not what. "It must have been a toilsome journey for your reverence."
"Alack, you may well say so. I did not believe I should ever ride so far again—and it is all for your sake. I would I were safe home again, that is all. These vile footpads would as soon rob a priest as a layman, I believe, and I am shaken to a very jelly."
"Your reverence must not think of returning to Holford tonight," said Jack.
He was dying to learn the good man's business, but he knew by experience that to try to hurry him was only to throw his brains into a hopeless confusion.
"I am sure my father will not be willing to have you leave us so suddenly, now that you have honored us with a visit."
"No, indeed, good father!" said Master Lucas heartily. "You must sup with us, and give me time to thank you for all your kindness to my boy."
"Tut, tut! That was nothing," returned Father John. "The young rogue! I could find it in my heart to wish I had never seen him, for he hath so wound himself round my heart as I could not have believed possible."
"Is my good uncle well, sir?" asked Jack.
"Well—why, yes, for aught I know," replied the priest, rather hesitatingly; "and yet—Is any one within hearing? I must speak to you in private."
Jack went out of the room and presently returned to say that Cicely and Anne had gone to evensong, that Simon was busy in the bakehouse, and he had set little Peter, the 'prentice, to watch the shop door.
"It is well," said Father John; "but yet we will speak low. My business is this: Father Barnaby has returned from his travels somewhat suddenly, and, it is said, with extraordinary powers from the Cardinal, to search out heretical books, and apprehend the owners thereof."
Jack looked at his father in dismay.
"Now I know not that this concerns you, my dear son," continued the priest, laying his hand on Jack's arm, and looking earnestly at him. "I hope, with all my heart, that it does not, and that for many reasons; but I know you are intimate with Arthur Brydges who makes no secret of his opinions, and there are other reasons: Father Barnaby is a
hard man, and especially bitter against heresy; and I would not, to be made Abbot of Glastonbury, have any harm happen to you."
"And you have taken this long journey to give me warning," said Jack, much affected, and kissing the old man's hand. "Truly, I know not how to thank you, dear father."
"But you must not say so, for the world, my dear son," said Father John hastily. "Remember, I am not supposed to know anything of this matter, and have come to consult your father on the investing of certain moneys left me by my brother, lately dead. I would not hear a word—supposing there were any such thing to hear—lest I should be called on to testify. Do you understand?"
"We both understand, reverend sir, and feel your kindness," said Master Lucas. "Believe me, I shall never forget it—"
"Tilly-vally, tilly-vally!" interrupted the priest. "It is naught! I have lived, I fear, a selfish life, and I would fain do some good before I die. I love not these new-fangled ways better than Father Barnaby himself. I am sure a parish priest's life is hard enough as it is, and they say the Lutherans are for having sermons every Sunday, and Scripture readings, and what not. No, I love no new fancies in religion, but I do not hold with all these burnings and imprisonments and the like. I think kindness and good treatment far more likely to bring men back to the truth."
"Why, there was Father Thomas, the librarian at Glastonbury; in his youth he was greatly taken with such of these new notions as were current—Lollardism, men called it then—and some of the brethren were for having him hardly dealt by."
