Incongruities

 In his colorful joint biography, Elizabeth and Essex, Lytton Strachey applies the humane liberal conscience of Bloomsbury to the world of the Tudors. He notes that the people of the Elizabethan Age lived amidst what strike us now as intolerable "incongruities." On the one hand, there is the unparalleled beauty of their verse and drama; the aesthetic pleasantries that poured forth from a nation experiencing cultural renaissance. On the other, there was what seems to us now a shocking level of casual brutality: Strachey cites the pitting of fights between stray dogs and captive bears, which passed for daily amusement; the vile punishments to which offenders were subjected: ranging from the removal of one's ears to the even more ghastly and horrific mutilations that awaited those convicted of high treason. 

Yet, perhaps the vividness of this contrast so overwhelms us because we sense it is true also of Strachey's, and our, age as well. Strachey lingers with particular disgust over the cruel fate that befell a certain Dr. Lopez—Elizabeth's personal physician, as well as an immigrant and refugee from the Inquisition in Portugal—who was falsely accused of engaging in a treasonous plot and ultimately railroaded to the execution grounds by means of bogus testimony obtained through torture (or the threat of torture). (Frances Yates has written compellingly of the atmosphere of antisemitism and witch-hunting that lurked under the surface of the apparently jovial Elizabethan age, and which she claims Shakespeare subtly protested against. We find evidence to support her account on both points in Strachey.)

On the one hand, the injustice of Dr. Lopez's execution serves to underline the contrast between modern values and Tudor ones. Not only was the good doctor condemned on the flimsiest evidence—he was also butchered in the most horrific of manners (Strachey does not spare us the details). Surely, such could not happen today; surely such things are not done on Albion's shore, to echo Blake's ironical question. Yet, Strachey's book appeared in 1928; and his tale of the persecution of Dr. Lopez, a "foreigner and a Jew," seems to presage the machinations of show trials, antisemitic purges, and killings by slow torture that would occur shortly thereafter, in Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia. Strachey was writing about another time—strangely violent and barbaric—yet, just as plainly, he was writing about his own. 

Every age is an age of contrasts, it turns out—not only the Elizabethan one. Humanity is forever building heavens and hells next to one another, in the other's despite (to borrow another phrase from Blake). Our world is made up of Arcadian paradises within short walking distances of gallows and torture chambers, just as the Tudor one was. In a poem he wrote about capital punishment (at a time when it was still practiced in Britain), Hugh MacDiarmid shows the same eerie contrast—the same "incongruity"—that Strachey finds so unsettling in the Elizabethan Age: he conjures a sunny green day, full of "men and women/ Respectable and respected and professedly Christian/ Idle-busy among the flowers of their garden," when—not but a few feet or miles away, others are being prepared for the electric chair.

And if such contrasts could persist into Strachey's and MacDiarmid's century, what are we to say of our own? Ours is a society that has abolished judicial torture (though it was practiced in off-shore facilities by executive order within my lifetime); always in American institutions we have expressly forbade "cruel and unusual punishments." Never here has man or woman been mutilated, quartered, or disemboweled by judicial sentence. Yet, the same society that can recognize the barbarism of putting people in the stocks, or cutting off their ears for passing bad money, sees no incongruity at all in practicing the ultimate form of physical violence upon the human body: namely, killing someone. How many people have been executed by our government, whether by injection, chair, or firing squad, operating under a constitution that allegedly foreswears "cruel" punishments? 

And this is not even to speak of what other horrors are inflicted upon people every day in our prisons, without any official order sanctioning them, and often without our knowledge. How many people are being beaten, assaulted, violated, left weeping and helpless, in these dark places right now, without us even being aware of it or sparing them a passing thought? Or how many people are suffering these fates, only to know that the supposedly "law-abiding" citizens actually greet their horrible fate with mockery and derision? In my lifetime, it was still considered a good joke in normal society to make light of the idea of people being raped in prison; and still today, people often cluck approvingly at the thought of sex offenders and "child molesters" being raped in prison, as if we believed that sexual torture was an appropriate element of a criminal sentence. 

Perhaps we are, then, those same "Respectable and respected and professedly Christian" people, busy in our gardens, oblivious of the unspeakable cruelties that are meanwhile being committed in our names. Perhaps ours is an age of contrasts as inescapably as the Elizabethan one was. We may not bait bears and nail down people's ears anymore; but do we not kill, or suffer to be killed, in circumstances scarcely less horrible? Do we not accept as a matter of course that people are suffering in darkness and agony, under conditions of confinement in prisons throughout our nation, and somehow never manage to think: what if it were me? What if it were someone I loved? Do we not put on plays and sing songs and make merry, just as the Elizabethans did, as if the world did not contain such horrors, when all the time they are happening not feet from us? 

And all at once, in contemplating this "age of contrasts"—our own—as MacDiarmid concludes his poem, our trust in the great friendship of living things deserts us.