The difficult justice of Melville & Kleist.

There is an old Venetian folk story about a peasant who searched and searched for a just person to be his newborn child's godfather. At last he met up with the Lord. "I need to baptize this little child, but I want a just person for his godfather," he said. "Are you just?" Embarrassed, the Lord hesitated in his reply: "Well, you see, to tell the truth, not really." "Then you can't be my boy's godfather," the peasant said and went on till he encountered Our Lady. She too when asked if she were just, blushed, and said she couldn't in good conscience claim so much. Finally the father encountered a lady dressed in black. "Yes, I believe I am a just person," was her answer. The infant's parents were overjoyed and the baptism duly took place with feasting and merrymaking. When the last guest had departed, the Signora Godmother invited the father into her palazzo and conducted him into a great hall in which many little flames were burning. The peasant halted in astonishment. "Godmother, what are all those little flames?" The Signora replied: "Those are the lights of all the souls of men. Look, will you, at that one there that's weak and on the point of going out? That's your little flame. There's almost no oil left in the lamp. And will you look at that one there burning bright and strong? That one is your little son's." The peasant trembled with fear. "Godmother," he begged her, "take a little drop of oil, would you, from my baby's lamp and put it into mine?"--"No," the Signora Godmother replied, "I am a just person: I am Death."

Very profound, the tale is. And buried in it is a silent laugh. There is no justice on earth, it says, nor in heaven neither, you fool. Is the story cynical? Yes, in an old Italian way. But in an old Italian way it isn't, for there is justice, after all, in death. Heaven is a church territory in the story, a kind of papal state, not really something on the other side of the phenomenal world, not a mystery. What is a mystery is death. Since death is a mystery, so, ultimately is justice. Which explains a lot by not explaining.

It is no news that justice is not an easy matter. Creon, King of Thebes, banging his fist down in the Antigone of Sophocles, says that whatever the ruler does is just, even when it is unjust. Such an idea of justice, which has never lost its currency, makes no sense, or rather it makes only too obvious sense: Don't argue with the justice of the ruler. Antigone's argument for disobeying Creon's order forbidding the burial of her brother Polyneices, who had warred against Thebes, is that the order did not come from Zeus above or the gods below. Neither "Creon nor any mortal man may overrule the gods' unwritten and unfailing laws," which since time immemorial commanded burial of the dead. The divine law is clear enough and becomes clear to Creon too, belatedly, after Teiresias gives him a talking-to.

The Chorus respects Antigone's piety, but you don't defy power so, they say. The bit priggish Antigone defends herself against the charge of overweeningness in a most surprising way. If it were her own dead child, or its dead father, she would have let the corpse moulder away rather than defy Creon's command. One husband gone, she might have found another, got another child to replace the lost one--but with her parents dead, there was no replacing her brother. The passage has been a stumbling block to commentators. It appears from it that the "unfailing" higher law is not so absolute as otherwise it is represented in the play, that it is subject to qualification--to us a very bizarre qualification.

Justice is a theme of much Greek tragedy, justice religiously-philosophically considered. This is often true, too, of Shakespearean drama. With Shakespeare, who has a positive dislike for absolutes, qualifications multiply, limits are set: "immoderate" authority, acting the god, tyrannizes; immoderate "liberty plucks justice by the nose." Yet it is still the case with him, as Hamlet says, "Offense's gilded hand may shove by justice ... but 'tis not so above." With some exceptions--notably Kleist, Ibsen, and Kafka--justice philosophically considered doesn't figure prominently in the European literature of the last two centuries. Issues of justice, and especially of social justice and law, are everywhere to be found in the great European novels, but not ideas, or intimations, which cast back (or down, or up--or around) for an ultimate source of our sense of right. Proust, too, in at least one notable passage, muses about how we come into this world 'already burdened by obligations--to be good, kind, considerate, scrupulous, oh, many things--which nothing on this earth imposes on us, which seems to belong to a different world, based on "laws which every profound work of intellect brings us nearer to and which are invisible only (were it only!) to fools."

In American literature we have an outstanding example of a philosophical narrative which looks up yearningly from the platform of earth to a different world whose injunctions to goodness, kindness, justice arc indeed traced in our hearts--but impotently.

It is Melville's Billy Budd. The troubling case recounted in that story is firmly resolved. Nevertheless the resolution leaves all concerned in a state of agitation: characters, readers and (you feel) the writer of the story himself. In the stories and plays of the ever surprising Prussian poet Heinrich von Kleist, born four ...