Free Shipwreck by Tom Stoppard Page B

   Even at the beginning! How sad for you, Maria … I’m sorry …
    Maria, to Natalie’s complete surprise, suddenly gives in to her rage
.
    MARIA    Don’t you look down on me with your stuck-up charity, you’re still the simpering little fool you always were—giving away your birthright,
idealising
it away in your prattle of exalted feelings … You can tell Ogarev he’ll get nothing out of me, and that goes for all his friends!
    The interview is evidently over. Natalie remains composed
.
    NATALIE    I’ll go, then. I don’t know what I said to make you angry. (
She gathers herself to leave.
) Your portrait, by the way, is a failure, no doubt because your friend thinks he can produce the desired effect on canvas in the same way he produces it on you, by calculation … If he dips his brush here and prods it there, he’ll get this time what he got last time, and so on till you’re done. But that’s neither art nor love. You and your portrait resemble each other only in crudeness and banality. But that’s a trivial failure. Imitation isn’t art, everyone knows that. Technique by itself can’t create. So, where do you think is the rest of the work of art if not in exalted feeling translated into paint or music or poetry, and who are you to call it prattle? German philosophy is the first time anyone’s explained everything that can’t be explained by the rules. Why can’t your expert lover satisfy a desire to paint like Raphael or Michelangelo? That would shut me up, wouldn’t it? What’s stopping him? Why can’t he look harder and see what the rules are? Because there aren’t any. Genius isn’t a matter of matching art to nature better than he can do it, it’s nature itself—revealing itself through the exalted feeling of the artist, because the world isn’t a collection of different things, mountains and rain and people, which have somehow landed up together, it’s all one thing, like the ultimate work of art trying to reach its perfection through us, its most conscious part, and we fall short most of the time. We can’t all be artists, of course, so the rest of us do the best we can at what’s our consolation, we fall short at love. (
She pauses for a last look at the portrait.
) I know what it is. He’s got your tits too high and your arse too small. (
Natalie leaves.
)
    M AY 1849
    Saxony. In a prison room, a lawyer
(FRANZ OTTO)
is seated at a table. Bakunin is in chains, sitting opposite
.
    OTTO    What were you doing in Dresden?
    BAKUNIN    When I arrived or when I left?
    OTTO    Just generally.
    BAKUNIN    When I arrived, I was using Dresden as my base while plotting the destruction of the Austrian Empire. But after a week or two, a local revolution broke out against the King of Saxony, so I joined it.
    OTTO    (
Pause.
) You understand who I am?
    BAKUNIN    Yes.
    OTTO    I am your lawyer, nominated by the Saxon authorities to present your defence.
    BAKUNIN    Yes.
    OTTO    You are charged with treason, for which the penalty is death. (
Pause.
) What brought you to Dresden? I suspect it was to visit the art gallery with its famous
Sistine Madonna
by Raphael. In all probability you had no knowledge of any popular insurrection brewing against the King. On May the third, when the barricades appeared, it was a complete surprise to you.
    BAKUNIN    Yes.
    OTTO    Ah. Good. You never planned any revolt, you had no obligation to it or connection with it, its objectives were of no interest to you.
    BAKUNIN    Absolutely true! The King of Saxony is welcome to dismiss his parliament, as far as I’m concerned. I look on all such assemblies with contempt.
    OTTO    There you are. At heart, you’re a monarchist.
    BAKUNIN    On May the fourth I met a