Brecht Collected Plays: 5: Life of Galileo; Mother Courage and Her Children (World Classics) (43 page)

A high official appears. Galileo turns to face him and makes a deep bow. He thinks it is the pope
.

THE HIGH OFFICIAL
: Has this person eaten?

FIRST OFFICIAL
: He was served a substantial meal.

THE HIGH OFFICIAL
: The session later may go on a long time.
Goes out
.

GALILEO
has risen to his feet in confusion:
Gentlemen, I know His Holiness personally, having met him once at Cardinal Bellarmin’s. But my eyesight is not what it was, and I must beg you to tell me when he is coming.

FIRST OFFICIAL
: Shall be done, even though you wouldn’t oblige us by making a proper meal.

GALILEO
: The fact that the gentleman who just left used the word ‘later’ when speaking about the Inquisition’s session today is surely a definite sign that His Holiness wants to speak to me first?

FIRST OFFICIAL
shrugs his shoulders
.

GALILEO
: Did you say something?

FIRST OFFICIAL
: I shrugged my shoulders.

13 [
12 or 11 in first typescript
]

Apart from the fact that Federzoni’s subsequent lines are given to the elderly scholar, that the end of the scene (after the blackout) was at first conceived as a short scene on its own, and that Andrea’s insults (’Wine-pump!’ etc., p. 91) are missing, this version is not much different from the final one. In the first typescript a speech for the elderly scholar was written in; it appears to belong after Andrea’s ‘He couldn’t write his book there’ (p. 88) but was omitted in revision.

Clearly he didn’t pay enough attention to that part. It’s true that he said: it’s not enough to know something, you have to be able to prove it. And he held his tongue till he was forty-six years old, and only spoke when he was able to prove his knowledge. But then he talked about his proofs to people with bunged-up ears, not to those who were dissatisfied with what had been believed in up to then but to those who were content with it. His mistake was to think that the choice between speaking in a republic and speaking in a grand duchy wasn’t an astronomical problem.

14 [
13, or 12 in first typescript
]

1633–1642. A prisoner of the Inquisition, Galileo continues his scientific studies up to his death. He manages to smuggle his principal work out of Italy

Like 9, this is a heavily altered scene with substantial differences from the final text. To sum them up briefly: (a) Galileo has conspired with a stove-fitter to conceal and smuggle out his writings; (b) Virginia reads him aphorisms by Montaigne, not scribbled texts provided by the archbishop; (c) his big speech (pp. 100–101) is differently conceived, though containing one or two phrases that recur in its final form; it omits all but the most general references to science’s social implications, accuses himself only of failure to speak up for reason, and includes neither the warning of a ‘universal cry of horror’, nor the
proposal for a scientists’ Hippocratic oath; (d) it is only
after
this speech that Virginia leaves the room and Galileo admits to having written the
Discorsi
; (e) Andrea’s enthusiastic reaction in praise of the ‘new ethics’ is missing, as also is Galileo’s counter-speech of self-abasement (’Welcome to the gutter’, p. 99); thus there are no dramatic reversals of feeling between the handing-over of the
Discorsi
and the end of the scene.

In the opening stage direction Galileo is described as ‘
old and ill, and moves like a blind man\
Virginia solicitously serves him his supper (’Now let’s eat up our good soup, and try not to spill a drop of it’). He then complains that the stove isn’t working properly, and asks when the stove-fitter is coming. The official in the antechamber (the monk of the final text) complains to Virginia that manuscripts have been leaking out:

Don’t forget that the
Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
was smuggled to Holland from here. And now they’ve intercepted a letter to Strasbourg, saying a manuscript will be coming. It must already have got out. Who took it?
Enter a big, broad-shouldered man, the stove-fitter. He has his tools with him
.

The stove-fitter is indeed the agent responsible, but this time he has brought the manuscript back because ‘They are after us. Villagio has been arrested’. The doctor then appears, to check on Galileo’s eyesight.

THE OFFICIAL
: Can he or can he not see?

THE DOCTOR
shrugs his shoulders:
I don’t know; very little, I’d say. I’ll be making my report.

Virginia then comes in again to read to her father. The following passage was published in 1957 in
Ver suche
15 as an addendum to the play:

VIRGINIA
: Shall I read to you?

GALILEO
: Yes, those inscriptions on the beams of M. de Montaigne’s library. But only the ones I’ve marked.

VIRGINIA
gets the book and reads:
54th Inscription: Without leaning.

GALILEO
: Is that all?

VIRGINIA
: Yes.

GALILEO
: But that depends on at least three things: the force of the thrust applied to one, the visibility of the objective and the solidity of the base. Some advice! Go on.

VIRGINIA
: 52nd inscription: I do not understand.

GALILEO
: That’s good. It’s a starting point.

VIRGINIA
: 13: It is possible and it is not possible.
¹

GALILEO
: Good, so long as he gives reasons.

VIRGINIA
: 5: It’s no more like this than like that or like neither.
²

GALILEO
: Provided one goes on looking.

VIRGINIA
: 21: He who knows that he knows doesn’t know how he knows.
3

GALILEO
: Again, that’s very good. But it all tastes of defeatism.

VIRGINIA
: 10: What are heaven and earth and sea, with all they embrace, against the sum of sums of the immeasurable whole?
4

GALILEO
: One has to start, though. Make a note.

VIRGINIA
: 2: He gave them curiosity, that he might torment them.
5

GALILEO
: Rubbish.

VIRGINIA
: 15: Man is too fragile.
6

GALILEO
: Not fragile enough.

VIRGINIA
: 20: Be wise in moderation, that you may not grow stupid.
7

GALILEO
: Go on.

VIRGINIA
: 42: Men are not confused by things but by opinions about things.
8

GALILEO
: That could be wrong too. Who confuses the opinions?

VIRGINIA
: Should I make a note of that?

GALILEO
: No.

VIRGINIA
: 19: I am a human; nothing human is alien to me.
9

GALILEO
: Good.

VIRGINIA
: 37: God has created man like a shadow. Who can judge him once the sun has set?
10

Galileo is silent
.

VIRGINIA
: 17: You should neither fear your last day nor yearn for it.
11

GALILEO
: I used to find the first point difficult: now it’s the second.

VIRGINIA
: 14: A wondrous thing is goodness.
12

GALILEO
: Louder!

VIRGINIA
louder:
A wondrous thing is goodness.

A much shorter alternative to the whole passage, which is also given in the first typescript, with Galileo and Virginia going over proofs, replaces it in the revised versions. In this Virginia reads Galileo the extract from the
Discorsi
which appears at the end of the previous scene in the final text.

At this point Andrea enters, and the dialogue is fairly close to the final text, up to where Galileo asks about his scientific friends ‘Did they learn anything from my recantation?’ (p. 96). Andrea hardly answers the question; he says nothing about Fulganzio, or, of course, Federzoni; the immediately preceding exchange about Descartes is also missing. Instead the text continues:

ANDREA
: For a time there was a considerable difference of opinion about you. Some of your former friends insisted that you had recanted because of services you still hoped to render physics by remaining alive. Because of such works as only you could write.

GALILEO
brusquely:
There are no such works.

ANDREA
: How do you mean? If you hadn’t written the
Dialogue
…

GALILEO
: Then someone else would have written it.

ANDREA
: So that wasn’t your motive?

GALILEO
: Shortly after my trial various people who had known me earlier were good enough to credit me with all kinds of noble intentions. I wouldn’t have this. To me it simply signified a decline of the critical faculties, brought about by the fact that they found drastic physical changes in me.

After carefully considering all the circumstances, extenuating
and otherwise, it is impossible to conclude that a man could arrive at this state of – call it obedience, from any other motive than an undue fear of death.
Pause
. That is not to deny
addressing Virginia
the profound regret which I, as a son of the church, felt when my superiors induced me, by the most weighty of all arguments, to see the error of my ways. As a rule nothing less than threatening a man with death will serve to dissuade him from something of which his reason, that most dangerous of all God’s gifts, has persuaded him. I fully understood that I could now only expect that hell which, so the poet tells, is inhabited by people who have gambled away the gifts of the mind and are accordingly without hope.

He tells Andrea that science should be able to get along without authority (including his own). ‘Authority and absence of truth doubtless go together, and so do truth and absence of authority.’ Andrea then sums up the case against him, as it emerges in this version:

… a lot of people everywhere were hanging on your words and actions because they felt what you stood for was not a particular theory about the movements of the stars but the freedom to theorise in any field. Not just for any particular thoughts, in other words, but the right to think in the first place, which was now being threatened. So as soon as these people heard you recanting all you had said they concluded that it was not merely certain thoughts about celestial motions that were being discredited but thinking itself that was being regarded as unholy, since it operates by means of causes and proofs.

Virginia replies that the church has not forbidden science, but has even absorbed Galileo’s main discoveries. Only he mustn’t attack the opinions of theology, which is an entirely different science.’ The big speech follows, starting very much as it does in the final text (p. 100):

GALILEO
: In my free time, and I’ve got plenty of that, I have asked myself how the world of science, of which I no longer consider myself a member, even if I still know a thing or two about its pursuits, will judge my conduct.
In lecture style, bands folded over his paunch
. It will have to take into account whether it is good enough for its members to provide it with a given number of principles, for instance about the tendencies of falling bodies or the motions of certain stars. I have, as I said, excluded myself from the scientific way of thinking; however, I take it that when faced with the threat of destruction that world will be in no position to lay down more far-reaching duties for its members, e.g., that of collaborating in its own maintenance as science. Even
a wool merchant, in addition to buying cheap and providing good wool, has to worry about his trade being permitted at all without restriction. On that principle no member of the scientific world is logically entitled to point to his own possible contributions to research if he has failed to honour his profession as such and to defend it against any use of force. This, however, is a business of vast scope. For science consists, not in a licence to subordinate facts to opinions, but in an obligation to subordinate opinions to facts. It is not in any position to permit restriction of these principles or to establish them only for ‘certain views’ and ‘those particular facts’. In order to make sure that it can apply these principles unrestrictedly at any one time, science has to fight to be respected in every sphere. For science and humanity as a whole happen to be in the same boat. So it can’t say ‘What business is it of mine if the boat springs a leak at the other end?’ [A passage cut from the original typescript here is repeated between two asterisks on p. 262 below.] Science has no use for people who fail to stick up for reason. It must expel them in ignominy, because, however many truths science knows, it could have no future in a world of lies. If the hand that feeds it occasionally seizes it unpredictably by the throat then humanity will have to chop it off. That is why science cannot tolerate a person like me in its ranks.

VIRGINIA
with passion:
But you are accepted in the ranks of the faithful (cf. p. 101)

GALILEO
: That is the position. In my view I have wrecked every experiment that might have been injurious to blind faith. Only my ingrained habit of making allowances for improbabilities would lead me to say ‘nearly every experiment’. Plainly nothing but the irresistible arguments put forward by the Inquisition could have convinced me of the harmfulness of my researches.

ANDREA
in a strangled voice:
Yes.

Virginia leaves the room, and Galileo at once slyly admits that he has had relapses (p. 97). The dialogue then roughly anticipates that in the final text, up to where Andrea takes up the manuscript of the
Discorsi
, with the difference that Andrea never assumes that the work has been irrevocably handed over to ‘the monks’ as occurs, with consequently heightened tension, in the final text. Nor does Galileo simply tell him to ‘Stuff it under your coat’ (p. 98), but makes more elaborate and self-protective hints as to how he might take it away. Then as Andrea leaves, there is a significantly different exchange, to which the section in square brackets was added in the course of revision: