No More Learning

*Prufrock and Other Observations, by T. S. Eliot. The Egoist, London. Essay first published in Poetry, 1917.
196
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The few poems which Mr. Eliof has given us maintain this proportion, as they maintain other proportions of art. After much contemporary work that is merely factitious, much that is good in intention but impotently unfinished and incomplete ; much whose flaws are due to sheer igno- rance which a year's study or thought might have reme- died, it is a comfort to come upon complete art, naive despite its intellectual subtlety, lacking all pretense.
It is quite safe to compare Mr. Eliot's work with any- thing written in French, English or American since the death of Jules Laforgue. The reader will find nothing better, and he will be extremely fortunate if he finds much half as good.
The necessity, or at least the advisability of comparing English or American work with French work is not readily granted by the usual English or American writer. If you suggest it, the Englishman answers that he has not thought about it--he does not see why he should bother himself about what goes on south of the channel; the American replies by stating that you are "no longer American. " This is the bitterest jibe in his vocabulary. The net result is that it is extremely difficult to read one's contemporaries. Afteratimeonetiresof"promise. "
I should like the reader to note how complete is Mr. Eliot's depiction of our contemporary condition. He has not confined himself to genre nor to society portraiture. His
lonely men in shirt-sleeves leaning out of windows are as real as his ladies who
come and go Talking of Michelangelo.
His "one night cheap hotels" are as much "there" as are his
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four wax candles in the darkened room, Four rings of light upon the ceiling overhead, An atmosphere of Juliet's tomb.
And, above all, there is no rhetoric, although there is Elizabethanreadinginthebackground. WereIaFrench critic, skilled in their elaborate art of writing books about books, I should probably go to some length discussing Mr. Eliot's two sorts of metaphor: his wholly unrealiz- able, always apt, half ironic suggestion, and his precise realizable picture. It would be possible to point out his method of conveying a whole situation and half a char- acter by three words of a quoted phrase; his constant aliveness, his mingling of very subtle observation with the unexpectedness of a backhanded cliche. It is, how- ever,extremelydangeroustopointoutsuchdevices. The method is Mr. Eliot's own, but as soon as one has re- duced even a fragment of it to formula, some one else, not Mr. Eliot, some one else wholly lacking in his apti- tudes, will at once try to make poetry by mimicking his externalprocedure. Andthisindefinite"someone"will, needless to say, make a botch of it.
For what the statement is worth, Mr. Eliot's work in- terests me more than that of any other poet now writing in English. * The most interesting poems in Victorian English are Browning's "Men and Women," or, if that statement is too absolute, let me contend that the form of these poems is the most vital form of that period of English, and that the poems written in that form are the least like each other in content. Antiquity gave us Ovid's "Heroides" and Theocritus' woman using magic- The form of Browning's "Men and Women" is more alive
*A. D. 1917.
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than the epistolary form of the "Heroides. " Browning included a certain amount of radocination and of purely intellectual comment, and in just that proportion he lost intensity. SinceBrowningtherehavebeenveryfewgood poems of this sort. Mr. Eliot has made two notable ad- ditions to the list. And he has placed his people in con- temporary settings, which is much more difficult than to render them with mediaeval romantic trappings. If it is permitted to make comparison with a different art, let me say that he has used contemporary detail very much as Velasquez used contemporary detail in "Las Meninas" the cold gray-green tones of the Spanish painter have, it seems to me, an emotional value not unlike the emotional value of Mr. Eliot's rhythms, and of his vocabulary.
James Joyce has written the best novel of my decade, and perhaps the best criticism of it has come from a Bel- gian who said, "All this is as true of my country as of Ireland. " Eliot has a like ubiquity of application. Art does not avoid utiiversals, it strikes at them all the harder in that it strikes through particulars. Eliot's work rests"'! apart from that of the many new writers who have used the present freedoms to no advantage, who have gained no new precisions of language, and no variety in their cadence. His men in shirt-sleeves, and his society ladies, are not a local manifestation; they are the stuff of our/ modern world, and true of more countries than one. I would praise the work for its fine toile, its humanity, and its realism ; for all good art is realism of one sort or an- other.
It is complained that Eliot is lacking in emotion. "La Figlia che Piange" is an adequate confutation.
If the reader wishes mastery of "regular form," the "Conversation Galante" is sufficient to show that symmet- rical form is within Mr. Eliot's grasp. You will hardly
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findsuchneatnesssaveinFrance; suchmodernneatness, save in Laforgue.
De Gourmont's phrase to the contrary notwithstanding, the supreme test of a book is that we should feel some unusualintelligenceworkingbehindthewords. Bythis test various other new books, that I have, or might have, beside me, go to pieces. The barrels of sham poetry that every decade and school and fashion produce, go to pieces. It is sometimes extremely difficult to find any other particular reason for their being so. unsatisfactory. I have expressly written here not "intellect" but "intelli- gence. " Thereisnointelligencewithoutemotion. The emotionmaybeanteriororconcurrent. Theremaybe emotion without much intelligence, but that does not con- cern us.
Versification:
A conviction as to the rightness or wrongness of vers libre is no guarantee of a poet. I doubt if there is much use trying to classify the various kinds of vers libre, but there is an anarchy which may be vastly overdone; and there is a monotony of bad usage as tiresome as any typical eighteenth or nineteenth century flatness.
In a recent article Mr. Eliot contended, or seemed to contend, that good vers libre was little more than a skilful evasionofthebetterknownEnglishmetres. Hisarticle was defective in that he omitted all consideration of metres depending on quantity, alliteration, etc. ; in fact, he wrote as if metres were measured by accent. This may have been tactful on his part, it may have brought his article nearer to the comprehension of his readers (that is, those of the "New Statesman," people chiefly concerned with sociology of the "button" and "unit" vari- ety). But he came nearer the fact when he wrote else-
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where : "No vers is libre for the man who wants to do a good job. "
Alexandrine and other grammarians have made cubby- holes for various groupings of syllables; they have put names upon them, and have given various labels to "metres" consisting of combinations of these different groups. Thus it would be hard to escape contact with somegrouporother; onlyanencyclopedistcouldeverbe half sure he had done so. The known categories would allow a fair liberty to the most conscientious traditional- ist. The most fanatical vers-librist will escape them with difficulty. However, I do not think there is any cry- ing need for verse with absolutely no rhythmical basis.
On the other hand, I do not believe that Chopin wrote toametronome. Thereisundoubtedlyasenseofmusic that takes count of the "shape" of the rhythm in a mel- ody rather than of bar divisions, which came rather late in the history of written music and were certainly not the first or most important thing that musicians attempted to record. The creation of such shapes is part of the- matic invention. Some musicians have the faculty of in- vention, rhythmic, melodic. Likewise some poets.
Treatises full of musical notes and of long and short marks have never been convincingly useful. Find a man with thematic invention and all he can say is that he gets what the Celts call a "chune" in his head, and that the words "go into it," or when they don't "go into it" they "stick out and worry him. "
You can not force a person to play a musical master- piece correctly, even by having the notes "correctly" printed on the paper before him; neither can you force a person to feel the movement of poetry, be the metre "regular" or "irregular. " I have heard Mr. Yeats try- ing to read Burns, struggling in vain to fit the "Birks o'
? 202 INSTIGATIONS
Aberfeldy'' and "Bonnie Alexander" into the mournful l<eenofthe"WindamongtheReeds. " Eveninregular metres there are incompatible systems of music.
I have heard the best orchestral conductor in England read poems in free verse, poems in which the rhythm was so faint as to be almost imperceptible. He read them with the author's cadence, with flawless correctness. A distinguished statesman read from the same book, with the intonations of a legal document, paying no attention to themovementinherentinthewordsbeforehim. Ihave heard a celebrated Dante scholar and mediaeval enthusi- ast read the sonnets of the "Vita Nuova" as if they were not only prose, but the ignominious prose of a man de- void of emotions : an utter castration.
The leader of orchestra said to me, "There is more for a musician in a few lines with something rough or un- even, such as Byron's
There be none of Beauty's daughters With a magic like thee;
than in whole pages of regular poetry. "
IJnless a man can put some thematic invention into
I'ers lihre, he would perhaps do well to stick to "regular" metres, which have certain chances of being musical from their form, and certain other chances of being musical throughhisfailureinfittingtheform. Inverslibrehis musical chances are but in sensitivity and invention.
Mr. Eliot is one of the very few who have given a personal rhythm, an identifiable quality of sound as wdl as of style. And at any rate, his book is the best thing in poetry since . . . (for the sake of peace I will leave thatdatetotheimagination). Ihavereadmostofthe poemsmanytimes; Ilastreadthewholebookatbreak- fast time and from flimsy proof-sheets: I believe these are"testconditions. " And,"confoundit,thefellowcan write. "
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JOYCE *
Despite the War, despite the paper shortage, and de- spite those old-established publishers whose god is their belly and whose god-father was the late F. T. Palgrave, there is a new edition of James Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. " t It is extremely gratifying that this book should have "reached its fourth thousand," and the fact is significant in just so far as it marks the beginning of a new phase of English publishing, a phase comparable to that started in France some years ago by the Mercure.
The old houses, even those, or even more those, Which once had a literary tradition, or at least literary preten- sions, having ceased to care a damn about literature, the lovers of good writing have "stinick"; have sufficiently banded themselves together to get a few good books into print, and even into circulation. The actual output is small in bulk, a few brochures of translations, Eliot's "Prufrock," Joyce's "A Portrait," and Wyndham Lewis' "Tarr," but I have it on good authority that at least one other periodical will start publishing its authors after the War, so there are new rods in pickle for the old fat-stom- ached contingent and for the cardboard generation.
Joyce's"APortrait"isliterature; ithasbecomealmost the prose bible of a few people, and I think I have en- countered at least three hundred admirers of the book, certainly that number of people who, whether they "like" it or not, are wholly convinced of its merits.
Mr. Wells I have encountered in print, where he says that Joyce has a cloacal obsession, but he also says that Mr. Joyce writes literature and that his book is to be ranked with the works of Sterne and of Swift.
* The Future, May, 1918.
t "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. " Egoist, Ltd. London. Huebsch,NewYork.
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Wells is no man to babble of obsessions, but let it stand to his honor that he came out with a fine burst of admiration for a younger and half-known writer.
From England and America there has come a finer volume of praise for this novel than for any that I can remember. There has also come impotent spitting and objurgation from the back-woods and from Mr. Dent's office boy, and, as offset, interesting comment in modem Greek, French and Italian.
Joyce's poems have been reprinted by Elkin Mathews, his short stories re-issued, and a second novel started in "The Little Review. "
For all the book's being so familiar, it is pleasant to take up "A Portrait" in its new exiguous form, and one enters many speculations, perhaps more than when one read it initially. It is not that one can open to a forgot- ten page so much as that wherever one opens there is always a place to start; some sentence like
"Stephen looked down coldly on the oblong skull be- neath him overgrown with tangled twine-colored hair"; or
"Frowsy girls sat along the curbstones before their baskets" ; or
"He drained his third cup of watery tea to the dregs and set to chewing the crusts of fried bread that were scattered near him, staring into the dark pool of the jar. The yellow dripping had been scooped out like a boghole, and the pool under it brought back to his memory the darkturf-coloredwaterofthebathinClongowes. The box of pawntickets at his elbow had just been rifled, and he took up idly one after another in his greasy fingers the blue and white dockets, scrawled and sanded and creased and bearing the name of the pledger as Daly or MacEvoy.
"i Pair Buskins, &c. "
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^ I do not mean to imply that a novel is necess\ bad novel because one can pick it up without beft^ this manner caught and dragged into reading; but indicate the curiously seductive interest of the clear-\ and definite sentences.
Neither, emphatically, is it to be supposed that Joyce's writing is merely a depiction of the sordid. The sordid is there in all conscience as you would find it in De Gon- court, but Joyce's power is in his scope. The reach of his writing is from the fried breadcrusts and from the fig-seeds in Cranley's teeth to the casual discussion of Aquinas
"He wrote a hymn for Maundy Thursday. It begins with the words Pange lingua glohosi. They say it is the highestgloryofthehymnal. Itisanintricateandsooth- ing hymn. I like it ; but there is no hymn that can be put beside that mournful and majestic processional song, the Vexilla Regis of Venantius Fortunatus.
"Lynch began to sing softly and solemnly in a deep bass voice
Tmpleta sunt quae concinit
David fideli carmine
"They turned into Lower Mount Street.
A few steps from the corner a fat young man, wearing a silk neck-
cloth, &c. "
On almost every page of Joyce you will find just such
swift alternation of subjective beauty and external shab- biness, squalor, and sordidness. It is the bass and treble ofhismethod. Andhehashisscopebeyondthatofthe novelists his contemporaries, in just so far as whole stretches of his keyboard are utterly out of their com- pass.
The conclusion or moral termination from all of which is that the great writers of any period must be the re-
. . .
. '
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markable minds of that period ; they must know the ex- tremes of their time; they must not represent a social status; they cannot be the "Grocer" or the "Dilettante" with the egregious and capital letter, nor yet the profes- sor or the professing wearer of Jaeger or professional eater of herbs.
In the three hundred pages of "A Portrait of the Artist as a. Young Man'' there is no omission ; there is nothing in life so beautiful that Joyce cannot touch it without profanation--without, above all, the profana- tions of sentiment and sentimentality--and there is nothing so sordid that he cannot treat it with his metal- lic exactitude.
I think there are few people who can read Shaw, Wells, Bennett, or even Conrad (who is in a category apart) without feeling that there are values and tonalities to which these authors are wholly insensitive. I do not imply that there cannot be excellent art within quite dis- tinct limitations, but the artist cannot afford to be or to appear ignorant of such limitations ; he cannot afford a pretenseofsuchignorance. Hemustalmostchoosehis limitations. If he paints a snuff-box or a stage scene he must not be ignorant of the fact, he must not think he is painting a landscape, three feet by two feet, in oils.
I think that what tires me more than anything else in the writers now past middle age is that they always seem to imply that they are giving us all modern life, the whole social panorama, all the instruments of the orchestra. Joyce is of another donation.
His earlier book, "Dubliners," contained several well- constructed stories, several sketches rather lacking in form. Itwasadefinitepromiseofwhatwastocome. There is very little to be said in praise of it which would not apply with greater force to "A Portrait. " I find that
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whoever reads one book inevitably sets out in search of the other.
The quality and distinction of the poems in the first half of Mr. Joyce's "Chamber Music" (new edition, pub- lished by Elkin Mathews, 4A, Cork Street, W. i, at is. 3d. ) is due in part to their author's strict musical train- ing. We have here the lyric in some of its best tradi- tions, and one pardons certain trifling inversions, much against the taste of the moment, for the sake of the clean- cut ivory finish, and for the interest of the rhythms, the
cross run of the beat and the word, as of a stiff wind cutting the ripple-tops of bright water.
The wording is Elizabethan, the metres at times sug- gesting Herrick, but in no case have I been able to find a poem which is not in some way Joyce's own, even though he would seem, and that most markedly, to shun apparent originality, as in:
Who goes amid the green wood With springtide all adorning her?
Who goes amid the rtierry green wood To make it merrier?
Who passes in the sunlight
By ways that know the light footfall ?
Who passes in the sweet sunlight With mien so virginal?
The ways of all the woodland Gleam with a soft and golden fire
For whom does all the sunny woodland Carry so brave attire?
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O, it is for my true love
The woods their rich apparel wear
O, it is for my true love, That is so young and fair.
Here, as in nearly every poem, the motif is so slight that the poem scarcely exists until one thinks of it as set to music ; and the workmanship is so delicate that out of twenty readers scarce one will notice its fineness. If Henry Lawes were alive again he might make the suit- able music, for the cadence is here worthy of his cun- ning:
O, it is for my true love. That is so young and fair.
The musician's work is very nearly done for him, and yet how few song-setters could be trusted to finish it and to fill in an accompaniment.
The tone of the book deepens with the poem begin- ning:
O sweetheart, hear you Your lover's tale;
A man shall have sorrow When friends him fail.
For he shall know then Friends be untrue;
And a little ashes Their words come to.
The collection comes to its end and climax in two pro- foundly emotional poems ; quite different in tonality and
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in rhythm-quality, from the lyrics in the first part of the book :
All day I hear the noise of waters Making moan,
Sad as the sea-bird is, when going Forth alone.
He hears the wind cry to the waters' Monotone.
The gray winds, the cold winds are blowing Where I go.
I hear the noise of many waters Far below.
All day, all night, I hear them flowing To and fro.
The third and fifth lines should not be read with an end stop. I think the rush of the words will escape the notice of scarcely any one. The phantom hearing in this poem is coupled, in the next poem, to phantom vision, and to a robustezza of expression
I hear an army charging upon the land.
And the thunder of horses plunging, foam about their
knees
Arrqgant, in black armour, behind them stand.
Disdaining the reins, with fluttering whips, the chari- oteers.
They cry unto the night their battle-name
I moan in sleep when I hear afar their whirling laugh-
ter;
They cleave the gloom of dreams, a blinding flame,
Qanging, clanging upon the heart as upon an anvil.
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They come shaking in triumph their long green hair They come out of the sea and run shouting by the
shore
My heart, have you no wisdom thus to despair ?
My love, my love, my love, why have you left me alone ?
In both these poems we have a strength and a fibrous- ness of sound which almost prohibits the thought of their being "set to music," or to any music but that which is in them when spoken; but we notice a similarity of the technique to that of the earlier poems, in so far as the beauty of movement is produced by a very skilful, or per- haps we should say a deeply intuitive, interruption of metric mechanical regularity. It is the irregularity which has shown always in the best periods.
The book is an excellent antidote for those who find Mr. Joyce's prose "disagreeable" and who at once fly to conclusions about Mr. Joyce's "cloacal obsessions. " I have yet to find in Joyce's published works a violent or malodorous phrase which does not justify itself not only by its verity, but by its heightening of some opposite ef- fect, by the poignancy which it imparts to some emotion ortosomethwarteddesireforbeauty. Disgustwiththe sordid is but another expression of a sensitiveness to the finer thing. There is no perception of beauty without a corresponding disgust. If the price for such artists as James Joyce is exceeding heavy, it is the artist himself who pays, and if Armageddon has taught us anything it should have taught us to abominate the half-truth, and the tellers of the half-truth in literature.
ULYSSES
Incomplete as I write this. His profoundest work,
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most significant--"Exiles" was a side-step, necessary ka- tharsis, clearance of mind from continental contempo- rary thought--"Ulysses," obscure, even obscene, as life itself is obscene in places, but an impassioned meditation on life.
He has done what Flaubert set out to do in "Bouvard and Pecuchet," done it better, more succinct. An epitome. "Bloom" answers the query that people made after "The Portrait. " Joyce has created his second charac- ter; he has moved from autobiography to the creation of the complimentary figure. Bloom on life, death, res- urrection, inimortality. Bloom and the Venus de Milo. Bloom brings life into the book. All Bloom is vital. Talk of the other characters, cryptic, perhaps too partic- ular, incomprehensible save to people who know Dublin, at least by hearsay, and who have university education plusmedisevalism. Butunavoidableoralmostunavoid-
able, given the subject and the place of the subject.
Note: I am tired of rewriting the arguments for the realist novel; besides there is nothing to add. The Brothers de Goncourt said the thing once and for all, but despite the lapse of time their work is still insufficiently known to the American reader. The program in the preface to "Germinie Lacerteux" states the case and the whole case for realism; one can yot improve the statement. I therefore give it entire, ad majorilm Dei gloriam.
"PREFACE
De la premiere edition
II nous faut demander pardon au public de lui donner ce livre, et I'avertir de ce qu'il y trouvera.
Le public aime les romans faux: ce roman est un ro- man vrai.
II aime les livres qui font semblant d'aller dans le monde,: ce livre vient de la rue.
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II aime les petites oeuvres polissonnes, les memoires de filles, les confessions d'alcoves, les saletes erotiques, le scandale qui se retrousse dans une image aux devan- tures des libraires, ce qu'il va lire est severe et pur. Qu'il ne s'attende point a la photographie decolletee du plaisir : I'etude qui suit est la clinique de I'Amour.
Le public aime encore les lectures anodines et conso- lantes, les aventures qui finissent bien, les imaginations qui ne derangent ni sa digestion ni sa serenite: ce livre, avec sa triste et violente distraction, est fait pour con- trarier ses habitudes et nuire a son hygiene.
Pourquoi done I'avons-nous ecrit? Est-ce simple- ment pour choquer le public et scandaliser ses goiits ?
Non.
Vivant au dix-neuvieme siecle, dans un temps de suf- frage universel, de democratie, de liberalisme, nous nous sommes demande si ce qu'on appelle "les basses classes" n'avait pas droit au roman ; si ce monde sous im monde, le peuple, devait rester sous le coup de I'interdit litter- aire et des dedains d'auteurs qui ont fait jusqu'ici le silence sur I'ame et le coeur qu'il peut avoir. Nous nous sommes demande s'il y avait encore, pour I'ecrivain et pour le lecteur, en ces annees d'egalite ou nous sommes, des classes indignes, des malheurs trop bas, des drames trop mal embouches, des catastrophe- J'une terreur trop peu noble. II nous est venu la curiosite de savoir si cette forme conventionnelle d'une litterature oubliee et d'une societe disparue, la Tragedie, etait definitivement morte; si, dans un pas sans caste et sans aristocratic legale, les miseres des petits et des pauvres parleraient a I'interet, a I'emotion, a la pitie aussi haut que les miseres des grands et des riches; si, en un mot, les larmes qu'on pleure en bas pourraient faire pleurer comme celles qu'on pleure en haut.
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Ces pensees nous avaient fait oser Thumble roman de 'Soeur Philomene,' en 1861 ; elles nous font publier aujourd'hui 'Germinie Lacerteux. '
Maintenant,quecelivresoitcalomnie: peuluiimporte. Aujourd'hui que le Roman s'elargit et grandit, qu'il commence a etre la grande forme serieuse, passionnee, vivante, de I'etude litteraire et de I'enquete sociale, qu'il devient, par I'analyse et par la recherche psychologique, I'Histoire morale contemporaine, aujourd'hui que le Roman s'est impose les etudes et les devoirs de la science, il peut en revendiquer les libertes et les franchises. Et qu'il cherche I'Art et la Verite; qu'il montre des miseres bonnesanepaslaisseroublierauxheureuxdeParis qu'il
;
fasse voir aux gens du monde ce que les dames de charite ont le courage de voir, ce que les reines d'autre- fois faisaient toucher de I'oeil a leurs enfants dans les hospices: la soufifrance humaine, presente et toute vive, qui apprend la charite; que le Roman ait cette religion que le siecle passe appelait de ce large et vaste nom: HumanitS; il lui suffit de cette conscience: son droit est la.
E. et J. de G. "
WYNDHAM LEWIS
The signal omission from my critical papers is an adequate book on Wyndham Lewis ; my excuses, apart from the limitations of time, must be that Mr. Lewis is alive and quite able to speak for himself, secondly, that one may print half-tone reproductions of sculpture, for however unsatisfactory they be, they pretend to be only half-tones, and could not show more than they do; but the reproduction of drawings and painting invites all sorts of expensive process impracticable during the
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yearsofwar. Whenthepublicorthe"publishers"are ready for a volume of Lewis, suitably illustrated, I am ready to write in the letterpress, though Mr. Lewis would do it better than I could.
He will rank among the great instigators and great inventors of design; there is mastery in his use of vari- ous media (my own interest in his work centres largely in the "drawing" completed with inks, water-color, chalk, etc. ). His name is constantly bracketed with that of Gaudier, Piccasso, Joyce, but these are fortuitous couplings. Lewis' painting is further from the public than were the carvings of Gaudier; Lewis is an older artist, maturer, fuller of greater variety and invention. His work is almost unknown to the public. His name is wholly familiar, BLAST is familiar, the "Timon" portfolio has been seen.
I had known him for seven years, known him as an artist, but I had no idea of his scope until he began mak- ing his preparations to go into the army ; so careless had hebeenofanypublicorprivateapproval. The"work" lay in piles on the floor of an attic ; and from it we gathered most of the hundred or hundred and twenty drawings which now form the bases of the Quinn col- lection and of the Baker collection, (now in the South Kensington museum).
As very few people have seen all of these pictures very few people are in any position to contradict me. There are three of his works in this room and I can attest their wearing capacity; as I can attest the duration of my regret for the Red drawing now in the Quinn col- lection which hung here for some months waiting ship- ment; as I can attest the energy and vitality that filled this place while forty drawings of the Quinn assortment stood here waiting also; a demonstration of the differ-
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ence between "cubism," nature-morte-ism and the vortex of Lewis: sun, energy, sombre emotion, clean-drawing, disgust, penetrating analysis from the qualities finding literary expression in "Tarr" to the stasis of the Red Duet, from the metallic gleam of the "Timon" portfolio to the velvet-suavity of the later "Timon" of the Baker collection.
The animality and the animal satire, the dynamic and metallic properties, the social satire, on the one hand, the sunlight, the utter cleanness of the Red Duet, are all points in an astounding circumference; which will, until the work is adequately reproduced, have more or less to be taken on trust by the "wider" public.
The novel "Tarr" is in print and no one need bother to read my critiques of it. It contains much that Joyce's work does not contain, but differentiations between the two authors are to the detriment of neither, one tries solely to discriminate qualities : hardness, fullness, abun- dance, weight, finish, all terms used sometimes with derogatory and sometimes with laudative intonation, or at any rate valued by one auditor and depreciated by
another. TheEnglishprosefictionofmydecadeisthe work of this pair of authors.
"TARR," BY WYNDHAM LEWIS *
"Tarr" is the most vigorous and volcanic English novel of our time. Lewis is the rarest of phenomena, an Eng- lishman who has achieved the triumph of being also a European. He is the only English writer who can be compared with . Dostoievsky, and he is more rapid than
/Dostoievsky, his mind travels with greater celerity, with more unexpectedness, but he loses none of Dostoievsky's effect of mass and of weight.
* Little Review.
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Tarr is a man of genius surrounded by the heavy stu- pidities of the half-cultured latin quarter; the book de- lineates his explosions in this oleaginous milieu; as well as the debacle of the unintelligent emotion-dominated Kreisler. They are the two titanic characters in con- temporary English fiction. Wells's clerks, Bennett's "cards" and even Conrad's Russian villains do not "bulk up" against them.
Only in James Joyce's "Stephen Dedalus" does one find an equal intensity, and Joyce is, by comparison, cold and meticulous, where Lewis is, if uncouth, at any rate brim- ming with energy, the man with a leaping mind.
Despite its demonstrable faults I do not propose to attack this novel. * It is a serious work, it is definitely an attempt to express, and very largely a success in ex- pressing, something. The "average novel," the average successful commercial proposition at 6s. per 300 to 600 pages is nothing of the sort; it is merely a third-rate mind's imitation of a perfectly well-known type-novel; of let us say Dickens, or Balzac, or Sir A. Conan-Doyle, or Hardy, or Mr. Wells, or Mrs. Ward, or some other and less laudable proto- or necro-type.
A certain commercial interest attaches to the sale of these mimicries and a certain purely technical or trade or clique interest may attach to the closeness or "skill" oftheaping,ortothe"application"ofaformula. The "work," the opus, has a purely narcotic value, it serves to soothe the tired mind of the reader, to take said "mind" off its "business" (whether that business be lofty, "intellectual," humanitarian, sordid, acquisitive, or other). There is only one contemporary English work
* Egoist, Ltd. , 23, Adelphi Terrace House, Robert Street, W. C. 2. 6s. net. Knopf, New York, $1. 50. Reviewed in
The Future.
? IN THE VORTEX 217
with which "Tarr" can be compared, namely James Joyce's utterly different "Portrait of the Artist. " The appearance of either of these novels would be a recog- nized literary event had it occurred in any other country in Europe.
Joyce's novel is a triumph of actual writing. The actual arrangement of the words is worth any author's study. Lewis on the contrary, is, in the actual writing, faulty. His expression is as bad as that of Meredith's floppy sickliness. In place of Meredith's mincing we have something active and "disagreeable. " But we have at any rate the percussions of a highly energized mind.
In both Joyce and Lewis we have the insistent utter- ance of men who are once for all through with the par- ticular inanities of Shavian-Bennett, and with the par- ticular oleosities of the Wellsian genre.
The faults of Mr. Lewis' writing can be examined in the first twenty-five pages. Kreisler is the creation of the book. He is roundly and objectively set before us. Tarr is less clearly detached from his creator. The au- thor has evidently suspected this, for he has felt the need of disclaiming Tarr in a preface.
Tarr, like his author, is a man with an energized mind. When Tarr talks at length; when Tarr gets things off his chest, we suspect that the author also is getting them off his own chest. Herein the technique is defective. It is also defective in that it proceeds by general descriptive statements in many cases where the objective presentment of single and definite acts would be more effective, more convincing.
It differs from the general descriptiveness of cheap fiction in that these general statements are often a very profound reach for the expression of verity. In brief, the author is trying to get the truth and not merely play-
? 2i8 INSTIGATIONS
ing baby-battledore among phrases. When Tarr talks little essays and makes aphorisms they are often of in- trinsicinterest,areevenunforgettable. Likewise,when the author comments upon Tarr, he has the gift of phrase, vivid, biting, pregnant, full of suggestion.
The engaging if unpleasant character, Tarr, is placed in an unpleasant milieu, a milieu very vividly "done. " The reader retains no doubts concerning the verity and existence of this milieu (Paris or London is no matter, though the scene is, nominally, in Paris). It is the existence where:
"Art is the smell of oil paint, Henri Murger's Vie de Boheme, corduroy trousers, the operatic Italian model . . . quarter given up to Art. --Letters and other things are round the corner.
". . . permanent tableaux of the place, disheartening
'
as a Tussaud's of The Flood. "
Tarr's first impact is with "Hobson," whose "dastardly
face attempted to portray delicacies of common sense, and gossamer-like back-slidings into the Inane, that would have puzzled a bile-specialist. He would occa- sionally exploit his blackguardly appearance and black- smith's muscles for a short time . . . his strong pierc- ing laugh threw A. B. C. waitresses into confusion. "
This person wonders if Tarr is a "sound bird. " Tarr is not a sound bird. His conversational attack on Hob- son proceeds by a brandishing of false dilemma, but neither Hobson nor his clan, nor indeed any of the critics of the novel (to date) have observed that this is Tarr's faulty weapon. Tarr's contempt for Hobson is as ade- quate as it is justifiable.
"Hobson, he considered, was a crowd. --You could not say he was an individual. --He was a set. He sat there a cultivated audience. --He had the aplomb and
--I
? IN THE VORTEX i2i9
absence of self-consciousness of number^, of the herd of those who know they are not alone. . . .
"For distinguishing feature Hobson possessed a dis- tinguished absence of personality. . . . Hobson was an humble investor. "
Tarr addresses him with some frankness on the sub- ject:
"As an oflF-set for your prying, scurvy way of peeping into my affairs you must offer your own guts, such as theyare. . . .
"You have joined yourself to those who hush their voices to hear what other people are saying. . . .
"Your plumes are not meant to fly with, but merely to slouch and skip along the surface of the earth. --^You wear the livery of a ridiculous set, you are a cunning and sleek domestic. No thought can come out of your head before it has slipped on its uniform. All your instincts are drugged with a malicious languor, an arm, a respectability, invented by a set of old women and mean, cadaverous little boys. "
Hobson opened his mouth, had a movement of the body to speak. But he relapsed.
"You reply, 'What is all this fuss about ? I have done the best for myself. '---I am not suited for any heroic station, like yours. I live sensibly, cultivating my vege- table ideas, and also my roses and Victorian lilies. -- do no harm to anybody. "
"That is not quite the case. That is a little inexact. Your proceedings possess a herdesque astuteness ; in the scale against the individual weighing less than the Yellow Press, yet being a closer and meaner attack. Also you are essentially spies, in a scurvy, safe and well-paid service, as I told you before. You are disguised to look like the thing it is your function to betray--What is your
:
individual.
and later
. "
. .
"YouarelibelingtheArtist,byyouridleness. " Also, "Your pseudo-neediness is a sentimental indulgence. "
All this swish and clatter of insult reminds one a little of Papa Karamazoff. Its outrageousness is more Rus- sian than Anglo-Victorian, but Lewis is not a mere echo ofDostoievsky. Hehustleshisreader,joltshim,snarls at him, in contra-distinction to Dostoievsky, who merely
!
? 220 INSTIGATIONS
position? --You have bought for eight hundred pounds at an aristocratic educational establishment a complete mental outfit, a program of manners. For four years you trained with other recruits. You are now a per- fectly disciplined social unit, with a profound esprit de corps. The Cambridge set that you represent is an average specimen, a cross between a Quaker, a Pederast, and a Chelsea artist. --Your Oxford brothers, dating fromtheWildedecade,areastrongerbody.