O p e n i n g s3 5spitting in the sherry decanter. It also means not being boorish,
arrogant, selfish and conceited.
Convention does not necessarily stifle feeling. It may judge
that an emotional response is too extravagant, but also that it is
too meagre. Whether one believes that sentiments and conven-
tions are bound together, or that they are at daggers drawn, is a
bone of contention between Hamlet and Claudius at the start of
Shakespeare’s play. Hamlet holds in his individualist way that
emotions like grief should disregard the social forms, whereas
Claudius takes the view that feeling and form should be on more
intimate terms than this. It is also part of the difference between
Eleanor and Marianne Dashwood in Austen’s Sense and Sensibility.
Poetry is a good example of how feeling and form are not neces-
sarily at loggerheads. Form may heighten feeling as well as suppress
it. Lycidas is not the expression of Milton’s regret at the death of
King. Rather, it is his regret. It is the kind of dutiful, ceremonious
elegy appropriate in the circumstances. There is no question of
insincerity, any more than it is insincere for me to wish you good
morning when I have many more pressing issues on my mind than
the kind of morning you might be about to have.
* * *Perhaps the best- known play of the twentieth century, Samuel
Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, opens with the following bleak line:
‘Nothing to be done.’ The words are spoken by Estragon, whose
companion in utter tedium and unassuaged misery is Vladimir. The
most celebrated figure of that name in the twentieth century was
Vladimir Lenin, who wrote a revolutionary tract entitled What is
to be Done? This may be no more than coincidence, though not
much in Beckett’s writing is less than meticulously calculated. If the