In a little play, The Revenge of Truth, written long before she was to achieve fame with her first collection of tales, Isak Dinesen expresses an idea that most critics have interpreted as the governing principle behind her attitude towards life and art. At the end of the play, the witch comes forth to state this idea in a speech which is also included in "The Roads Round Pisa" (Seven Gothic Tales) as the central motif of that story.

The truth, my children, is that we are, all of us, acting in a marionette comedy. What is important more than anything else in a marionette comedy, is keeping the ideas of the author clear. This is the real happiness of life, and now that I have at last come into a marionette play, I will never go out of it again. But you, my fellow actors, keep the ideas of the author clear. Aye, drive them to their utmost consequences.

Such critics as Aage Henriksen, Eric Johannesson, and Robert Langbaum have explored the ramifications of this statement, have noted its indebtedness to Heinrich von Kleist's "Dialogue on the Marionette Theater," and have argued convincingly against the oversimplified interpretation of the statement as advocating either determinism or blind acceptance. I mention it here, not to add unnecessarily to that discussion, but to point out that Isak Dinesen does believe that man has a primary possibility in life which it is his duty to discover and to exploit. He is equally free not to discover this possibility and not to exploit it, but his greatest happiness comes from believing that there is an author and a play and that the role he is to assume is the only possible one for him.

The author to whom the witch refers is specifically the human author of the marionette comedy, but it is obvious that she is also referring to God as the author of life. The fusion of the two meanings in the single word is the beginning of Isak Dinesen's critical thinking, for stemming from this comparison between God and the artist are all the principles by which she judges art. Although both God and the artist are authors, the artist is not master of the situation, for he has an adversary in the greater artist, God. The artist is, himself, a character in God's greater story, and as such he is as much obliged as anyone else to "keep the ideas of the author clear." For Isak Dinesen, God is the greatest artist; it is He who will finally read the last proof. As Johannes Rosendahl puts it: "God is the poet, the artist in whom man must put himself" [in Karen Blixen: Fire Foredray, 1957].

It is not surprising, then, that Isak Dinesen should see the offices of priest and poet as reverse sides of the same coin. In "The Cardinal's First Tale" (Last Tales) she affirms the inseparableness of the two offices in the character of Cardinal Salviati whose personality contains a strong mixture of both. When the lady in black asks him, "Who are you?", he must tell her a strange story in the midst of which he asks: "Who, Madame, is the man who is placed, in his life on earth, with his back to God and his face to man, because he is God's mouthpiece, and through him the voice of God is given forth? Who is the man who has no existence of his own—because the existence of each human being is his—and who has neither home nor friends nor wife—because his hearth is the hearth of and he himself is the friend and lover of all human beings?" The lady's reply to this question is "the artist," to which the Cardinal adds that it is also the priest.

The Cardinal is well qualified to talk about the poet-priest relationship because he was trained to be both. He and his twin brother were intended at birth to be, one an artist and the other a priest. But the death of one brother in a fire and the resulting confusion of identities led to the other's being educated officially for the priesthood but unofficially as an artist. Through this man Isak Dinesen is able to express not only the Apollonian-Dionysian tension in both artist and priest but also to reveal how both share, along with the aristocrat, a separation from ordinary society as well as an obligation to a destiny that differs significantly from that of the rest of humanity. In fulfilling their own destinies, these are the only persons who consciously lead others to fulfill theirs. In a world where all destinies were obvious, the artist, the priest, and the aristocrat would have no reason to exist.

Because his back is to God and he serves as God's mouthpiece, the artist, as well as the priest and the aristocrat, must share something of God's loneliness and risk; and he is denied certain advantages that other men are free to enjoy, among these the possibility of remorse and the possession of honor. "Certain spiritual benefits granted to other human beings, are indeed withheld," says the Cardinal, but he also reminds the lady in black that the Lord indemnifies his mouthpiece. "If he is without potency, he has been given a small bit of omnipotence." And he adds:

Calmly, like a child in his father's house binding and loosening his favorite dogs, he will bind the influence of Pleiades and loose the bands of Orion. Like a child in his father's house ordering about his servants, he will send lightnings, that they may go and say to him: 'Here we are.' Just as the gate of the citadel is opened to the vice-regent, the gates of death have been opened to him. And as the heir apparent will have been entrusted with the regalia of the King, he knows where light dwells, and as to darkness, where is the place thereof.

It is in such stories as "Sorrow-Acre" (Winter's Tales) and "Converse at Night in Copenhagen" (Last Tales) that Isak Dinesen includes the aristocrat in her category of God's mouthpieces. "Of all people in Copenhagen," says the poet, Johannes Ewald, in "Converse," "very likely you and I, the monarch and the poet, are the two who come nearest to being almighty." Lonely and slightly mad, young King Christian VII, whom Ewald is addressing, is the poet's perfect counterpart. In their vastly different ways both men bear a burden of responsibility to man and God that is not shared by either man or God. The inclusion of the aristocrat in the triumvirate of those who stand in lieu of God is important because it points up the fact that even those who rule in God's place are not free from the exigencies of mortality. The old lord in "Sorrow-Acre" explains patiently to his impatient nephew Adam that although the aristocrat bears the same responsibility to those beneath him as the gods do to those beneath them, the aristocrat is still subject, like all men, to the will of the gods.

Isak Dinesen makes the sharpest distinction between the functions of God and the artist when, in "The Deluge at Norderney" (Seven Gothic Tales), the valet disguised as a Cardinal refers to God as the arbiter of the masquerade and to the artist as the arbiter on reality. As arbiter of the masquerade, God has a taste for disguises and prefers his creatures to respect his mask and their own rather than attempt to give back to him the truth which he knows already. To reveal the truth is his prerogative, and the day on which he chooses to reveal the truth will be the day of judgment—"the hour in which the Almighty God himself lets fall the mask," as the disguised valet puts it. The masks behind which God conceals the truth are everywhere present in nature, but they are not always readily apparent to man. The person best equipped to perceive the masks that pervade reality is the artist; and it is his function, as the arbiter on reality, to make these masks apparent as masks, in a way that leads not to any explicable truth behind the masks, but rather to an acceptance of the presence behind the masks of a truth which we are not privileged to understand.

The process of discovering the masks within reality is somewhat like the children's game in which one is asked to study a drawing and find as many faces as he can in what looks at first glance to be merely a landscape. It is the artist who is most adept at discerning these faces, and when he points them out to us to our satisfaction, we find that we can no longer look at the landscape without seeing the faces. After a while it may even be difficult for us to see the landscape at all or believe that we ever could have seen it and nothing else. The faces then become more important than the landscape; the landscape exists only to contain the faces; and although we know no more about the truth behind the drawing than we did before, we cannot deny the presence of the masks nor the effect they give to the drawing, which is to make it seem whole and proper only when they are in it. God, as arbiter of the masquerade, draws the faces and then obscures them in the landscape; and the artist, as arbiter on reality, fills in the drawing in such a way that the landscape reveals the faces.

Part of the risk inherent in this distinction is that of failure on the part of the artist to perceive the mask or, perceiving it, not to re-create it authentically. Or he may go the other way and see more faces than are really there, thus misrepresenting God with false images. A much greater risk, however, stems from the artist's disadvantage of not knowing any more of the truth behind the mask than any other man. As Johannes Rosendahl says, the decisive factor is: will the artist tell his own story or God's? The artist is not master of the situation as God is; thus he must work without the assurance that God has that he is doing the right thing.

The weight of the risk is heavy, and in a character such as Charlie Despard who appears both in "The Young Man with the Carnation" Winter's Tales and "A Consolatory Tale" Winter's Tales, Isak Dinesen portrays the artist in the throes of wrestling with his responsibility and in danger of lapsing into despair. "I have had to read the Book of Job, to get strength to bear my responsibility at all," says Despard to Aeneas Snell in "A Consolatory Tale." "Do you see yourself in the place of Job, Charlie?" asks Aeneas. "No," says Despard solemnly and proudly, "in the place of the Lord."

Hans Brix, in Blixens Eventyr, feels that Isak Dinesen identified very closely with the character of Charlie Despard. His very initials suggest her own (Karen Christentze Dinesen), and his situation in "The Young Man with the Carnation," the story that introduces her second volume of stories, Winter's Tales, resembles her own just prior to its publication. He is a writer whose first book was a success and who is now worried about his second. "A Consolatory Tale," which concludes Winter's Tales, shows a still questioning but more confident Despard fusing his ideas with those of the equally adept story-teller, Aeneas Snell. Their ideas about story-telling, although different, are really merely two ways of arriving at the same end.

By identifying the artist with the Lord in the story of Job, Isak Dinesen further isolates him from the society of common men and establishes him as a person of extraordinary obligations. Developing his analogy, Despard explains his theory to Aeneas Snell. "I have behaved to my reader as the Lord behaves to Job," he says, "I have laid a wager with Satan about the soul of my reader. I have marred his path and turned terrors upon him, caused him to ride on the wind and dissolved his substance, and when he waited for light there was darkness."

What Despard does not say, but what we, as readers, remember, is that the artist as man is not spared Job's lot. There is, therefore, a double burden upon him. For while he may hold with the valet/Cardinal in "Deluge" that the mask of God will fall away on the day of judgment and the voice in the whirlwind take on meaning, he knows that the answer to the mysteries which his art presents are also locked in that voice and behind that mask, and it is not in his power either to know or to dispense secrets.

When the lady in black, in "The Cardinal's First Tale", sighs at the lot of the artist, the Cardinal tells her not to have pity on him.

The servant was neither forced nor lured into service. Before taking him on, his Master spoke straightly and fairly to him. 'You are aware,' he said, 'that I am almighty. And you have before you the world which I have created. Now give me your opinion on it. Do you take it that I have meant to create a peaceful world?' 'No, my Lord,' the candidate replied. 'Or that I have,' the Lord asked, 'meant to create a pretty and neat world?' 'No, indeed,' answered the youth. 'Or a world easy to live in?' asked the Lord. 'O good Lord, no!' said the candidate. 'Or do you,' the Lord asked for the last time, 'hold and believe that I have resolved to create a sublime world, with all things necessary to the purpose in it, and none left out?' 'I do,' said the young man. 'Then,' said the Master, 'then, my servant and mouthpiece, take the oath!'

A similar dialogue with the Lord in "The Young Man with the Carnation" brings Despard to the point where he is ready to accept the Lord's covenant. Again, the Lord's preliminary questioning is rendered by Isak Dinesen in the manner of God's dialogue with Job.

"Who made the ships, Charlie?" he asked. "Nay, I know not," said Charlie, "did you make them?" "Yes," said the Lord, "I made the ships on their keels, and all floating things. The moon that sails in the sky, the orbs that swing in the universe, the tides, the generations, the fashions. You make me laugh, for I have given you all the world to sail and float in, and you have run aground here, in a room of the Queen's Hotel to seek a quarrel."

It is at this point that the Lord makes it clear to Despard that the artist creates not for himself or his public but for God because, as Peter says, in "Peter and Rosa" (Winter's Tales): "If the work of God does not glorify him, how can God be glorious?" Aage Henriksen says that this question is an assertion and that the assertion immediately has consequences for the poet who, in his works, has put himself in the place of God. The story-teller, says Henriksen, is providence for the persons that he tells about and can see to it that they get what they deserve. "However," Henriksen asks, "what does man deserve, and what can he in reality get? An explanation? Justice? Grace?" These questions, Henriksen goes on to say, cannot be answered except by what he calls "artistic evidence" [Aage Henriksen, Guder og gulgefugie, 1956].

Artistic evidence is much like the Lord's answer to Charlie Despard. It is not an answer at all, really, but an injunction not to expect answers; and before it Despard is silenced. With the discussion thus ended, Despard is ready to enter into a pact with the Lord in which the Lord makes it clear that the purpose of art is not to explain Him but to glorify Him.

"Come," said the Lord again, "I will make a covenant between me and you. I, I will not measure you out any more distress than you need to write your books." "Oh, indeed!" said Charlie. "What did you say?" asked the Lord. "Do you want any less than that?" "I said nothing," said Charlie. "But you are to write the books," said the Lord. "For it is I who want them written. Not the public, not by any means the critics, but ME!" "Can I be certain of that?" Charlie asked. "Not always," said the Lord. "You will not be certain of it at all times. But I tell you now that it is so. You will have to hold on to that." "O good God," said Charlie. "Are you going," said the Lord, "to thank me for what I have done for you tonight?" "I think," said Charlie, "that we will leave it at what it is, and say no more about it."

        ["The Young Man with the Carnation"]

In addition to the Lord's insistence that Despard write for Him, there are two important points in this last dialogue that are fundamental to Isak Dinesen's concept of the artist. One has to do with the "measure of distress" that the Lord promises to dispense in quantities just sufficient to result in the production of art. The other is Despard's reluctance to thank the Lord for what the Lord has agreed to do. This last point is pertinent here in clarification of the relationship between God and artist. In not allowing Despard to show gratitude to God, Isak Dinesen is denying the artist the comfort of common piety. What she implies is that the distresses measured out to the artist balance any rewards. One does not show gratitude for a dearly purchased gift.

Besides bestowing the gift of creativity on the artist, God also supplies him with the raw material out of which he can create fictional characters that can outlive God's own mortal ones. In a story within the story, "The Roads Round Pisa", the librettist Monti is replying to a Monsignor Talbot who has just asked Monti if he really does believe himself to be a creator in the same sense as God.

"'God!' Monti cried, 'God! Do you not know that what God really wants to create is my Don Giovanni, and the Odysseus of Homer, and Cervantes's knight? Very likely those are the only people for whom heaven and hell have ever been made, for you cannot imagine that an Almighty God would go on forever and ever, world without end, with my mother-in-law and the Emperor of Austria? Humanity, the men and women of this earth, are only the plaster of God, and we, the artists, are his tools, and when the statue is finished in marble or bronze, he breaks us all up. When you die you will probably go out like a candle, with nothing left, but in the mansions of eternity will walk Orlando, the Misanthrope and my Donna Elvira. Such is God's plan of work, and if we find it somehow slow, who are we that we should criticize him, seeing that we know nothing whatever of time or eternity?'

In creating such imaginative and enduring characters, the artist is, however, not exceeding God's imagination but rather entering into it. Erik O. Johannesson says that in Isak Dinesen's world "God is the greatest artist because He has the greatest imagination…. When her characters … recognize their limitations and affirm the power of God, they affirm the artist and the story, for God is the greatest story-teller of them all" [The World of Isak Dinesen, 1961].

When an artist is at his best, he is exhibiting what the valet disguised as a Cardinal in "Deluge" calls the "tremendous courage of the Creator of this world." The artist is closest to God and to the creative spirit when he is exercising, in the words of Adam in "Sorrow-Acre," "Imagination, daring, and passion." "Your stories are over our stories," says Charlie Despard; and this acknowledgment leads Johannes Rosendahl to note the obligation on the part of the artist to rise above the triviality of life and its banal claims and to make his stories rival God's own.

God's envy of man's creation as expressed by Monti in "Roads" is balanced by what the valet/Cardinal goes on to say about man's envy of God.

Every human being has, I believe, at times given room to the idea of creating a world himself. The Pope, in a flattering way, encouraged these thoughts in me when I was a young man. I reflected then that I might, had I been given omnipotence and a free hand, have made a fine world. I might have bethought me of the trees and rivers, of the different keys in music, of friendship, and innocence; but upon my word and honor, I should not have dared to arrange these matters of love and marriage as they are, and my world should have lost sadly thereby. What an overwhelming lesson to all artists! Be not afraid of absurdity; do not shrink from the fantastic. Within a dilemma, choose the most unheard-of, the most dangerous, solution. Be brave, be brave! Ah, Madame, we have got much to learn.

The idea of creating a world himself occurred also, we know, to Satan who did not shrink from absurdity or the fantastic. In Isak Dinesen's concept of the artist there is a trace of the diabolical, and Louis E. Grandjean points out in Blixens Animus that she shared with Nietzsche the belief that the Satanic are preferable to the good who do not create, since the diabolical create more than they destroy. Even Cardinal Salviati in "The Cardinal's First Tale" must confess to the lady in black that he is not sure it is God he serves.

It is probably the painter Cazotte in Ehrengard who best illustrates the presence of the diabolical in the artist. While in the midst of a scheme to humiliate Ehrengard, he betrays his peculiarly mixed loyalties in a letter to the Countess von Gassner.

P.S. Walking in the garden this evening Prince Lothar said to Princess Ludmilla: "So here is Paradise." And with her head upon his shoulder his young wife echoed: "Paradise." I smiled benevolence on them, like an archangel assisting the Lord in laying out the garden of Eden, and smiling on the first human male and female. But the great landscape architect himself, when his work had been completed, on looking at it and listening to the Gloria and Hallelujah of his angelic chorus, will have felt the craving for a clear, unbiased eye to view it with him, the eye of a critic, a connoisseur and an arbiter. With what creature, in all Paradise, will he have found that eye, Madame? Madame—with the Serpent!

If the Serpent had been content to be nothing more than critic, connoisseur, and arbiter, he would very much have resembled the artist who, as the old artist in "Copenhagen Season" (Last Tales) tells his drawingroom audience, would not have been shocked by the nakedness of Adam and Eve. But there is a vital difference between the two. The artist turns his passive observations into action by recreating what he sees; the Serpent steps out of his role as passive observer into the role of active manipulator by interfering in what he sees.

Thus, Cazotte might resemble an archangel when he is busily arranging the Eden-like retreat at Rosenbad, and he is the balanced artist when he is painting scenes and portraits; but the diabolical begins to overpower him at the time he is painting Ehrengard's portrait without her knowledge and for impure reasons; and it consumes him completely once his plan to seduce Ehrengard—albeit symbolically—is put into practice. In so doing, however, Cazotte leaves himself vulnerable to the prophecy in the Garden which foretells that the woman shall conquer. His plan fails, and the victory goes to Ehrengard.

To say that Cazotte has confused life with art, has tried to mix the two, has endeavored to alchemize art into life is to say that he has tried to usurp God's role as arbiter of the masquerade. Life, Isak Dinesen insists, is God's story, and he will dress it as he sees fit and with greater imagination. Any attempt to invade his domain will result in surprise and failure for the interloper. Out of the raw material of His imagination God has fashioned creation and given it to man as the raw material out of which man, as artist, may fashion art. As God respects the artist by refusing to turn reality into art, so must the artist respect God by resisting the temptation to turn art into reality.

The efficacy of this mandate is the express concern not only of Ehrengard but also of "The Immortal Story" (Anecdotes of Destiny) and "The Poet" (Seven Gothic Tales). "The Immortal Story" is the tale of an old man, Mr. Clay, who deliberately sets about turning a traditional sailor's yarn into reality. For years sailors have told each other about how, during shore leave, they were picked up by an elderly man, carried to his lavish home, plied with the finest food and wines and then given five pounds to sleep with the old man's lovely young wife. When Mr. Clay is told this story by his faithful clerk, Elishama, and it is explained to him that the story has no truth in it, Mr. Clay will not rest until he sees the story enacted before his eyes with himself in the role of the impotent old man.

With the able assistance of his clerk, Mr. Clay manages, not without some difficulty, to hire the services of a prostitute and to pick up a young sailor from the waterfront. The fact that old Mr. Clay must hire a prostitute because he does not have a wife is only the first of many ways in which the story changes as it is brought to life. Two attempts to pick up a sailor fail, and when they finally do find one who will cooperate, it is one who is more interested in the money than in the adventure. The sailor is on the point of leaving several times during dinner, but he is persuaded to stay only to surprise everyone by falling in love with the prostitute. The following morning he finds it difficult to see any resemblance between what has just happened to him and the story he has heard (and told) many times at sea. But once he does see the connection, he insists that he will never tell what happened to him because surely no one would ever believe it.

The yarn as it has always been told is a mask visible by the story teller through his arbitrary use of reality. But once that mask is violated, is forced to become real, it vanishes and a different mask takes its place. The new story is a totally different story. It is not the story of a sailor's dream but of an old man's desire to impose his will upon life. Ironically, the old man dies during the night, and his death reveals that a greater imagination than his is directing the story.

As an imaginary arrangement of incidents and characters to conform to the ideas of the story-teller, the story is safe. But the moment the story takes life, the moment the imagination of the artist comes in conflict with the imagination of God, the artist loses control over it and usually suffers in the bargain. I think the evidence is clear that Isak Dinesen would scorn those who would take her views on aristocracy and acceptance too personally and try to pattern their lives in accordance with those of any of her characters. The artist's job, as she sees it, is not to show man how to live but to heighten his consciousness of the life he is already living.

Councilor Mathiesen in "The Poet" (Seven Gothic Tales) repeats Cazotte's and Mr. Clay's mistake but with direr consequences. To compensate for his own failure as a poet, Mathiesen meddles in the life of the genuine young poet, Anders Kube. He hopes by interfering to guide Kube towards higher poetic powers and thereby experience vicariously the fruits of success. In order to accomplish this end, Mathiesen decides to marry the young widow, Fransine, because he knows that she and Kube have fallen in love, and he feels that such a melancholy romantic situation will stimulate Kube to new lyrical heights. As his plan takes shape, however, a greater imagination than his assumes control and brings about a quite different story. Mathiesen does not know that Kube plans to commit suicide on the day of the wedding. Nor does he anticipate that his scheme to have Fransine disrobe before her lover on the night before the wedding will result in disaster and death.

The idea for the midnight disrobing is an idea which Mathiesen has taken from a currently popular and highly controversial German romance. By so doing, Mathiesen is giving another turn of the screw to the theme of life imitating art. Life, of course, departs radically from art when Kube spurns Fransine and then uses the suicide gun to shoot the voyeur Mathiesen. Bleeding profusely, the Councilor crawls back to the house to which Fransine has fled and tries to convince her with his dying breath that the world is still beautiful and good. Because it suits him that the world should be lovely, he means to conjure it into being so. But Fransine knows that the world of which he speaks is really the world in which Anders Kube will be hanged for murder, and in her anguish she lifts up a large stone and crushes Mathiesen's head. "You," she cries at him. "You Poet!"

The epithet is bitterly ironic because Mathiesen is the antithesis of Isak Dinesen's true artist. He has usurped God's role by taking Kube into his own hands, and he has violated the mask by forcing reality upon it. Mathiesen dies with his hand outstretched to touch Fransine's heel while she stands above him, the conquering woman. The scene is Isak Dinesen's most graphic illustration of the Biblical prophecy and her own relentless assertion of the evil of exceeding the limits of art. In Ehrengard and "The Immortal Story" only the perpetrators suffer, but in "The Poet" the suffering extends to others. The innocent lovers become murderers.

The true artist keeps the ideas of the author clear. Once he has found his way into a marionette play, he will never go out of it again.