Nothing new about that and the thin veil of observance, torn off in a jiffy
whenever
it seemed opportune even after centuries of pretending.
Ezra-Pound-Speaking
Bowers might like a list of precedents, just showing that the CLEVER financiers, the Gouverneur Morris's, etc.
didn't INVENT anything--all the jokes are so much older than Harpo.
And apparently when it is a matter of finance or a legislative assembly cheatin' the people, NO wheeze, no dirty swindle EVER wears out. The Hoosier NEVER learns, no nice college boy ever fails to fall under the spell of a plateglass partition, and a few holes and [a] fine marble floor.
Here lies America, she died of the romance of luxury. The wreck of a country, the wreck of a nation starts when the ruling class starts being bribed. Same old story, Grand Dukes betraying Russia, French nobles selling up France, British nobility utterly worm-eaten by greed. And now the old United States of America dying off, 80 years after the sellout to Rothschild. Eighty years of usury taking, 80 years of grovelling before wealth, being ready to accept pay without ever thinkin' what causes it.
? Damn [it] all, I seem to be gittin' moral. Well, what about it? Be scientific, HOW much pizin' can the national body stand?
That question can be put scientifically, just as well as puttin' it in a hortatory form, or asking what is nice, or what ought a decent man do. No man will do anything WORTH doin' till some sense of "OUGHT" enters his system. Profit motive is silly, in the sense that it ultimately kills the good life; makes the mare go, yass, makes the mare go, money makes the mare go. And then somebody wakes up crazy. And that takes JUST long enough, so nobody notices what is going on. Suddenly wake up and find American abundance has been chucked out of the window. Ten billion here, ten billion there, and then ease has departed, and sailors don't care.
Saxony under the Kings of Poland had emitted bonds, Slauer that had fallen to 35%, reimburse 'em at par. The Congressmen who voted for assumption invented nothing, they were just being dirty. And all of 'em ought to have been shot. It's a long list. Tunis bonds. These particular kinds of swindle weren't invented in the new United States of America during the times of the early Congressional sessions. Just small town stuff, provincial villainy. Should we keep on after 160 years? Does it show political development?
What the United States lacks under the Morgenthau infamy is any sense that dirty swindles bring misery to thousands of people, hundreds of thousands, that we have risked something more than mere comfort.
My time is about up for this session. Ezra Pound speakin'.
And of course, you ought NOT to be in this war. Even to cover up the gross failure of the Administration to govern the United States of America, let alone fixing up the affairs of Europe and Asia.
? #50 (June 28, 1942) U. K. (B64) THE GIFTIE
It was Bobbie Burns, and no Englishman, who sent up his prayer: O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us
And the emotion behind the lines is probably more unEnglish than anyone who hasn't lived amongst it for over a decade can ever imagine.
I am having another go at it. And if wandering about Mayfair in 1916 the life of your ruling caste appeared to me perched on a very thin crust of painted cardboard, what must it seem now when looked at from OUTSIDE the circle of your tight little private world of illusion?
In those days I felt it, as I said, perched on a fragile crust, and my own brief role or my own feelin' rather that of John Baptist's poking up a scrawny head from the cellarage. Through the grill of some grating.
Some of you I do not name, because it would be too much like a family squabble. No malice on my part, but too much intimacy to be suitable to an international discussion of anything.
One cannot attack public figures when one has saved family photos from wreck and destruction. Or can you, or should you? That may be a case of conscience. Jezabel in her pram, and the rest of it.
I tell you once again, and I try to make myself, even with my peregrine accent, intelligible at least to some of you.
The wave of disgust that sweeps over the outer world at hearing some of your propaganda--after all, radio is the only free speech left--the wave of disgust is due to the absoLOOT falsity of your statements and of the assumptions underlying them. Even those of you who have been accustomed to the forgeries of your own high-hatted synagogue [must]
? shudder at some of the transmissions sent out by the cheap kikes of Schenectedy, New York, and Baastun.
The grease is laid on so thick by Mr. Churchill's [English] Hebrews and Mr. Roosevelt's American Hebrews. Can any of you, would any of you, as an exercise, as a mental setting-up exercise, be persuaded to look at some of your more piffling and prominent SERIOUS weeklies three or four months after the fact, just to gauge what IS fed you by your alleged intelligentzia?
You are NOT going to win this war. None of your best minds EVER thought you could win it. Nevertheless, your Alices still mince around on the other sides of their mirrors.
Mr. Cole, for example, known as Goddamhell Cole, Alice in person, the world after an Anglo-kike victory. Is it friendly to the people of England, is it friendly to ANYone to put up this false horizon? Are you all Zukor's employees?
You have never had a chance in this war. You had a chance possibly, at least from here it might at some time have appeared, did in fact appear that you had a chance for a beau geste, for a vindication of national honor by going thru a set of belicose motions, and sacrificing a reasonable number of men. Immolation of victims, as atonement not for the crimes of your empire, but for the imbecilities of the ruling gang and the bad, nay the wholly atrocious taste shown in putting up Eden.
An elderly colonel of my acquaintance volunteered to participate in a defense of Poland by air, for example. But that was NOT in the plans of your owners. Nothing but a protracted war and the maximum of profits on debt and gun sales suited your rulers. I don't mean your acknowledged rulers, I mean the creditors of your bullies and popinjays. The men back of the puppet show.
? And nothing HAS contented them save the most ignominious deliquescence of a great empire that history throws up on the screen of my memory. There may have been more ignominious ends. My studies have not been sufficiently extensive to enable me to recall them. Never have so many allies been let down by ANY one empire. Never have attacks on late allies been so notorious.
Never have the reasons for alliance been so base as those in your alliance with the Red butchers of wherever Stalin is resident at this moment. And never has the folly of a half wit been more flagrant than in the acts of your ostensible government.
As sheer imbecility, FIRST the policy against Italy, then that in entering a war on Japan. Truly the mind and intelligence are in small esteem among Britons.
By May 15 I was ready to mention your loss of Australia. I don't assert you have lost it, I merely wish to date the day on which I was ready to believe you were losing it. In fact after the Australian bombing of an American what was it, torpedo boat or something, I heard the murmur; hanno individuato il nemico. They, meaning the Aussies, have identified the enemy.
That was an exaggeration. You and the American people HAVE indeed an enemy, but the enemy wasn't on board that torpedo boat. The enemy is greed, avarice, usury, falsification incarnate in a group of unpleasant persons WHOM your intelligentzia, or your bloomsbury, or your professoriate, seems curiously unwilling to look at in the open light. ALLergic to all symptoms and indications. Allergic to justice whatever the other party in lite has interests opposed to what you have been taught were your own, but which sometimes WERE not.
FOR 25 years it has been apparent, and I dare say plenty of Europeans saw it before then, it has been apparent that the world could only be
? saved by a conspiracy of intelligent men, and that they would have to conspire AGAINST the Normans, the Sieffs and the Goldsmids, together with the minor lice over in Paris, the Iazards, Mandels and the rest of 'em.
AND your tolerated writers, your half witted socialists, your publicists, your Garvins, Beaverbunks, and the rest of 'em did NOT join such a conspiracy. You are barkin' up the wrong tree, and your bite has not proved very toothy, not if measured by Axis and Tripartite standards. Your smell, as caricatured in the Japanese papers, a couple of young ladies holding their noses. You are almost qualifying for ostracism. You can not, oh hell, you can't believe THAT.
You are such nice mannered people (when eh . . . nothing annoys you). Or as Charles Ricketts said: "No, people who are doing something for the world have NOT nice manners" (His own were a bit slinky). He continued: "The people who have these nice manners are the people the world is doing something FOR. "
Well how far off that seems, Ricketts and Shannon, the Haken [? ] press printing the works of Laforgue in the '90s. Alice in Wonderland, Mr. Cole, the denizens of the New Statesman and Nation. Don't believe me get the old copies, back from the lost era of January or February 1942, that is the year current.
Pomp of power, and so forth. When, gol drat it, WHEN you are wrong, when your chief ape has been wrong time and time over, does IT never enter your noddles, or noodles, to look for the source of error? Does it never begin to strike you that Margot Asquith is being unconsciously humorous when she writes-- --. If you hadn't been bred out of all thoroughness, if your thoroughbreds hadn't been decimated in three wars one after another, ALL [for the] power of Jewry, all piling up debt and debt interest. Repudiations, repudiations of debt, enormous burdens of tax needed according to your LYING and treacherous lackeys and
? professors and so called economists for service, or interest payment on DEBT, public, national, municipal and the rest of it.
COULD have been drug to the present pass. Would none of you have had the civic guts, the intellectual sphincter strength to organize SOMEthing, anything against Churchill's creditors? And the owners of BOTH your out-in-front parties? Morrison is a pup no cleaner than Winston, and just as fanciful and Mr. G. D. Hell Cole.
And as for your relations with the Arabian, Persian, and Mohammedan peoples? I trust none of my dearer friends are in service on those torrid frontiers.
For one drop of sincerity, for one voice on your air to say that the Emperor is NOT wearing clothes!
Yes, you will be left with the land of your island. Lymington and a few others may start a new hive. But you will have a very large population [and] no land space, unless you make some arrangement to ship a good deal of it out to Rhodesia. The question remains whether you will take measure to SELECT the stock that is to remain in old England. To see to it that the ENGLISH remain and the Yiddish go forth to Bolivia or wherever. And you will NOT do it on usury, you will not do it in contempt of all ethics, or of all fair knowledge of the nature of money, numisma.
A small state, a fascist state unless you like Stalin. That last phrase is not serious. England will NOT build tomorrow on the work system of the Stalin canal, but that will be thru no fault of Sieff, Goldsmid,-- --You will have to lay off your trappings, you will have to study new hygiene, you will have to give back their naturalization papers to the sweepings of Europe.
Let the Jews BUY a national home somewhere in your ruins. They have sold a good deal of Africa into serfdom; and NOT been nice to the
? ENGLISH who ventured on WORKING there, who went there to raise crops of food stuff. The usury system is unpleasant. The world is almightily ONTO that system. The Bu? rgermaster of Worgl, or in other words, common honesty, is of more use to Tomorrow's England than all the gold of the Indies or all the opium of the Sassoon, and the consequent revenues, concerning which Bobble Cecil can or should by now be able to supply ample details.
The effect of the B. B. C. transmissions is that, in the whole pack of their transmitters, there is no one who dares mention the Jewish problem, Brain Trust included. Probably lose their jobs if they tried, and what can be expected from a profession with Shaw and Wells at the top who think 24 hours a day of their incomes and of the truth at spare moments? Only England dare not mention the expulsion of Jews by Maria Theresa, nor England's blackmail of Maria Theresa, nor the Jews' relations with Cromwell. American radio is silent, partly from ignorance, the poor hicks just don't know any history, though a gang of foolish youngmen had the exuberance to get jailed for plotting to bump off all the Jew members of Congress. Had they succeeded, such is the American gangster and anarchist psychology that the only comment inside the United States would have been "and a damn good thing too. " (With echos in unspeaking England. ) The only place where anyone would have been shocked is in Italy, where there is a millennial conservatism and a prejudice against-- --.
#51 (July 2, 1942) U. S. (B65) DISBURSEMENT OF WISDOM
My friend F. Whiteside never tired of a very well known story of Chase and Whistler. For those of you to whom Chase's name is unfamiliar one may as well say that Whistler was a painter of very great talent. He had limitations, his drawing bothered him, some of his paint has now sunk into the canvas and the nuances he so labored may not last forever, but he was certainly one of the ornaments of his time, and with Henry James
? the two Americans who lit up the horizon of American youth at the turn of the century, and certainly some of his work will give joy to the elite as long as the canvas or paper remains.
Whereas Chase was, in painting, the equivalent of Harper's monthly magazine, Chase returned to the American like Howells, but on one occasion he disagreed with Jimmy, and on being kidded, he broke off: "I won't argue with you any longer. " To which Mr. Whistler with weary patience: "But, Chase, I am NOT arguing with you. I am just telling you. "
The Chinese have a more monumental exposition of the same theme: In evil time the sage can enjoy his own wisdom; when the land is well governed, the people benefit from his instructions.
Now apart from any national talents that I may or may not possess I have, first in poesy, and then in economics, which is one of the components of history, spent considerable more time and thought, and I do enjoy or suffer a thirst for knowledge which is, to put it mildly, above the common.
You are in a bloody mess. Bloody in more senses than that word has in British jargon. You are in a bloody MESS. Who got you there? Why did he do it? Does he know why he did it? Does he know HOW he dit it?
You have all of you been chicken-headed, frivolous, etc. You don't even know whether your various races of European origin will or CAN survive on a continent that has seen the fade-out of Mayas and Aztecs. And you have an ORGANIZED minority of a different race amongst you. A race that never tires, a race possessed of subcrocodilian vitality. And the lively lizard is "on this earth very antient" as huddy (W. H. Hudson) remarks of the condor and other predatory foul of the Andes.
AXIOM. Against an organized force of four or more, probably EIGHT million, a hundred individuals can NOT prevail until ORGANIZED. The
? sporadic efforts of a few excited young men are no use. The dilettante velleities of a few theorists are NO use. And the rest of the inhabitants of the United States can organize on ONE basis only, namely, that on which Europe has finally been constrained to organize its rebellion against the pervasive the ubiquitous Yidd. Pacts may be signed between the Pennsylvania Deitsch and the scrawny New Englander of British or Anglo-Scotch origin, but on no basis save that of race, and of allied more or less consanguineous races can you cohere.
You have, as opposed to any such projected order not merely the 4 or 8 million kikes in New York and points penetrated already. [From] New York to San Diego or wherever the pan hebe, the world Jewry, has set up a radio. Which is bloody well more than the rebellious British reformers were able to do in England during the four years before the betrayal of the British race by Churchill and Eden.
That being the vital point in the German program and the press being in the hands of kikery (high kike) and the subjugated servants of Jewry, some possibly only 1/2 or 1/3 conscious of what they were up to.
Religious base, no use; has been exploited. History of massacres re theology points [to the] downfall of Byzantium, as LONG as it was possible to stir up war on religious basis; that label was used to stir up strife.
Tacitus: Jews back, of persecution of early Christians. Fights in church between iconoclasts and the religious part of the church, down to the Germanic wars of religion. With the quite simple advice of the opponents, i. e. Jews, to THEIR component members; to GET into the church; get into the church, get into the prebends; to take holy orders and corrupt the church from inside (documented). Till you get the almost perfect instrument, Luther, both religious fanatic (on the question of the trinity, etc. ) and a very good politician, rebelling against being taxed by
? an ecciesiast central; already corrupted, and fallen into the hands of a banking family.
Religious base, no USE, that is written and proved over and over in European history which you do ill to ignore. Church split into fragments on one hand; and then any diplomatic representative of a foreign race can SO easily go thru the motions of getting converted.
Nothing new about that and the thin veil of observance, torn off in a jiffy whenever it seemed opportune even after centuries of pretending. No, no great hoax, that of combatting on religious base. Simple-minded European tribesmen fell for it, were weakened during about 1600 years, continual attrition. Wonder we're here at all. Must be something tough in European and Mediterranean fibre.
As to effects on, let us take a test tube specimen, France. According to some reckoning France had 38% of the population of the great powers in Louis XIV's time, 27% in 1789 and has 13% at present. I don't know just what powers are included in those figures, but on whatever calculation it has been made, it indicates a DECLINE.
Anyhow, religious basis NO use. What CAN you organize on?
Can't move 'em with a cold thing like economics. Marx advised fighting on economic basis. I still meet people who fall for that bit of eminently semitic strategy. For ONE HUNDRED years, simpletons and inexperienced young men have tried AS, damn it, my friends, of a dozen sects, economic sects; I tried ever since my kitten of mind got its eyes half open. And what came of it? Five thousand in prison, Wo? rgl, Alberta.
Yes, yes, we lily-livered humanitarians fussed 'round wantin' to cure the evil by honest accountancy; and we did NOT prevent this war.
I think my most obtuse opponent, or my most enthusiastic opponent, or Frankies' most faithful UNhappy warrior Archie MacLeish will admit that the reformers, the monetary reformers, the men who wanted honest
? functioning of the treasuries and of finance in England and America, did NOT prevent this war. (And damn lucky if they stave off the next one. ) Oh yes, the kahal makes 'em in series. SERIES technocracy, why waste the plant on ONE world calamity? The last one was nearly a world war.
The Talmud announced destruction of 75% of the goy. Yes, brother you have an OPPONENT. And what CAN you rely on? Dan Boone out shootin' squirrels. Hit 'em in the eye every time, but the Boone era, Daniel Boone era, has gone forever. The Boone era seems to have got mislaid for the moment. Prosperity has went, it has vamoosed. We wipp, nichishin, chippewa language has vanished with the pure injun dialects. Even the mixed idiom such as "que voulex you buju, nicichin" is no longer current on the Canadian frontier. And Henry James already noticed a change in New York phonetics.
On the seventh day gawd rested. I noted THAT even in [the] days of the Little Review. Either the European stock now resident in North America ORGANIZES or it sinks still deeper into the morass of high kikery. Its ideals and ideas have WENT. The structure of the Anglo-American landwidg is kufuzzled.
About 20 lost men in the United States DID notice the race problem, if not in time, at least in time to be read by Europeans who were really thinking about the WAY OUT. Undoubtedly it is pleasant to think that IF you get rid of capital system the Jew becomes harmless. That was oily Marx's bait, and what happens is the Stalin canal.
A FAKE elimination of capitalism, an attack of ALL civilization, even as much as had leaked into Russia. An attack on property, that is on private ownership of LAND, plows and bathtubs, but the USURER left in command. Not only have the nice and polite amongst us who TRIED to reform the hell of the stinking capitalist, i. e. , usury world, by honest accountancy, monetary and economic reform been shown up as ABSolootly incapable of gathering a mass of adherents powerful enough
? to DO anything, let alone resist a barbarian avalanche. BUT when capitalism has been dethroned etc. Slobody, Slobody for the fishes, open the fish breedin' tanks, in Slavic enthusiasm. That elimination of so called "capitalism" is merely used as a flail, a steamroller to crush out the rest of the non-chewish world, that is as much of it as it could ever run, in collusion with the decrepit, syphilitic, Sassonic, beCecil's sewage and mould of the British plutocracy.
The rot eating in since Cromwell, since the Constantinopolitan kikes were so INTerested in that damn hypocrite that they sent over an embassy to see if Cromwell was their Messiah. Much more in their line than the young fellow from Nazareth. I am not arguing, I am just telling you. One of these days you will have to start thinking about the problem of race, BREED, preservation.
I do NOT like to think of my race as going toward total extinction, NOR into absolute bondage.
The Cincinnati etc. erred from snobbery. They did not in George Washington's time organize on racial basis. No one thought of it, no one could have then thought of it. There WAS a racially homogeneous population in the newly freed colonies. Certain privileges were dear to the privileged. Snobbism is NOT conservative. Fashion is not conservative. La Mode, etc. is a ramp. Cf. with Hungarian and Roumanian peasant linen, one shirt or blouse lasts a life time, indestructable as real Chinese silk, "no can tear. "
That is what the advertising trade diddles you out of and you will have to think about Race.
#52 (July 6, 1942) U. S. (B66) CONTINUITY
? Had I the tongue of men and angels I should be unable to make sure that even the most faithful listeners would be able to hear and grasp the whole of a series of my talks.
That is the disadvantage of the radio form, and heaven knows when I shall be able to print these texts in book or books available to the American and English public. Book implying that [the] reader CAN, when he wishes, look back, take up the statement of the preface, see where Chapter X hitches onto Chapter I. Nevertheless you may as well make the effort to grasp at least the fact that there IS a sequence in what I am saying, and that the conversation of February coheres with that of April. And if you, you in Iowa, Wyoming, Connecticut, DON'T make that effort, if you don't listen and TRY to get [the] main threads and cables of what I am telling you, you will lose time.
Just as the writers who did NOT read the Little Review lost time. Many never made it up. There is no one of any literary size, or even pretenions among you who hasn't by now read the Little Review authors, or authors formed by the Little Review authors. Authors indebted to the Little Review and to its authors for their force, their take off, the initial jab that set 'em off.
Pity is that many got only a fragmentary view. Joyce and not Eliot, Eliot not W. Lewis. I hear a million Americans have taken advantage of Mr. Hemmingway's last production, and so they ought to. TWO million ought to read it (probably . . . I haven't yet seen a copy but that is due to conditions of Atlantic transport).
PITY is that there is so much else, so much essential else that they are unblissfully UNaware of. And I honestly do not know where they can get essential parts of that else, except from my broadcasts. And out of them, out of these talks, the young men in England and America will have to build their souls, or at least their minds for tomorrow, or LOSE time, never get into life at all.
? They will not be tomorrow's Hemingways, or even today's Clark Gables. They will be just shelved, left on the cupboard floor, this way inglorious and ungloried, back numbers before they are dated. Like neo- Georgians who read Mr. Eliot 15 or 26 years late, and tried to cut little nitches in his umbrageous cathedral, mouse holes in his choir stall.
And after a hundred broadcasts it is STILL hard to know where to begin. There is so MUCH that the United States does not know. This war is [the] fruit of such vast incomprehensions, such tangled ignorance, so many strains of unknowing.
I am held up, enraged, by the delay needed to change a typing ribbon, so much is there that OUGHT to be put into the young American head. Don't know which, what to put down, can't write two scripts at once. NECESSARY facts, ideas, come in pell-mell. I try to get too much into ten minutes. Condensed form O. K. in book, saves eyesight, reader can turn back, can look at a summary. Mebbe if I had more sense of form, legal training, God knows what, could get the matter across the Atlantic, or the bally old channel. Art, economics, pathology. You need to know MORE about all of 'em. Need to GIT out of this war, need to stay out of, or prevent the next one, need to change the stinkin' old system.
ROT in art, art as pathology, university delays. How come class war? What is it the professors don't know? Got to choose between two or four subjects or I will git nothing over in any one talk. Very well. I will start on: How come. Two bits of ignorance that have recently been rubbed into me by a mob or congress of professorial persons. NO . . . let's start on something that HAS been discussed IN America for twenty years, 30 years, Doctor looks at literature. All this quite silly talk about the diseased mind back of modern painting.
It bored me like hell. It was mostly poor stuff. BUT the fault lay in its limitation AS criticism, not in the main worry that caused half educated
? medicos to go into it. What was wrong with the criticism was lack of proportion.
HEALTH is MORE interesting than disease. Health is TOTAL. Beauty is MORE interesting than distortion.
We have most of us been buffaloed, or at any rate the intelligentsia is mostly an ass. NOT from having no brains, but simply from partialism in the original sense of that word. Intelligentsia is mostly a nuisance because it runs on snobisms and fragments.
At [the] age of 15 a consumptive gave me a copy of Salome? with Beardsley's illustrations. I cut 'em out, they were so ugly. But for more than ten years of my life I considered this an act of genuine fanaticism. I came to see the . . . damn it all, call 'em merits of Beardsley's distortions.
GROANS from the effete, elite and superior sophomores.
Later a distorted but amiable female presented me coyly with an inferior Beardsley, that is, a volume of distortions by a pink nailed esthete. The significance of THAT act was apparent even to me. I don't think it was conscious on her part. The book probably gave her relief or comfort that she could not have derived from Praxiteles or Botticelli. At any rate I was older, and the drawings weren't even good Beardsley. AND I wasn't interested in pathology. So I have never mentioned the incident before.
The medicos who started worrying about the disease behind modern art were right. That is, they were RIGHT to worry. They were mostly silly in their statements of detail, and this was due to ignorance, lack of cultural heritage. But they were on the right line.
I affirm that future art criticism will be able to tell the component of usury tolerance. How far the TOLERANCE of usury prevailed, or did not prevail when a given picture was painted. Sense of design, precision of LINE, will give way to interest in detail. Suggestion of luxury will
? augment as people lose an ethical basis of life, as they lose passion for justice, love of real distinction between one idea and another. Diagnosis will replace love, analysis will give way to squalor. There are steps and slopes downward toward Avernus, falsification will enter. Honest men, when a dogma or style has been falsified, will turn analytic. They will be partial, the first ones emphatic and vigorous. They will aim, that is, the best ones will aim at health.
For example, Manet, fed up with falsification of color in painting, Manet reduced to analysis of light and color. Both making distinct contributions to world art. Manet one of the world's greatest.
But what is temperament in a sound man becomes by excess, disease in a weak man. Unbalance, hard to divide at certain point, and if one drifts with the current, one grows tolerant first of weakness, and then accustomed to weakness, and then plops into squalor.
Mediterranean sanity and beauty, order. TO KALON, the world was saner when the cult of ugliness did NOT engage the attentions of anyone.
I know all about chocolate box, pseudo beauty, etc. BUT a deflection of the AIM is a decadence. It is a false ripening, it is green fruit going rotten. Beardsley was a sick man, knew he had to make a name quick if he wanted to make it. Personal wish, NOT belief in what art is or ought to be. Knew he hadn't time to learn to PAINT. HIS sane youthful impulse was to pre-Raphealite beauty. Early drawings, Burne-Jones, that's what he WANTED.
Yeats asked him why he hadn't stuck to it. Beardsley was no slouch, he was a courageous invalid. He was a heroic invalid, up to the point of his force. He didn't lie to himself nor to his friends in private. He answered:
Beauty is so DIFFICULT.
? We have all seen the cult of beauty turn to slop. Esthete: an artist who won't take pains, who will NOT face the work needed to paint a good picture, or write a good novel or poem. All fragmentary, nothing total. And the GREAT perversion, the great decadence, when the painting is made to sell, when the artist stops wanting to live. Worth his hire, MUST eat, but EAT secondary AS desire, to will to paint, or to make. Then to git rich, that is the END, the absoloot end of a painter. Few men can resist the lure, we all like comfort. That is my weakness and I have seen men who can do without it. I know no American will much believe that, and some of the men who can do without it are lunatics and fanatics. And snobbism doth make coneys of them all. So far as I know, nobody else had the courage to point out that the German pavilions at the Binennale di Venezia four years ago was the best. All the little daubers in the shops, doing Monet and Renoir 60 years late were shocked by the hardness of outline. It was almost the only pavilion not rotted with slobber, some more, some less.
The futurist rooms are always an affirmation of propaganda that could get along by itself without any painting whatever. I mean the main line of futurist propaganda is an idea, the painting an adjunct.
And apparently when it is a matter of finance or a legislative assembly cheatin' the people, NO wheeze, no dirty swindle EVER wears out. The Hoosier NEVER learns, no nice college boy ever fails to fall under the spell of a plateglass partition, and a few holes and [a] fine marble floor.
Here lies America, she died of the romance of luxury. The wreck of a country, the wreck of a nation starts when the ruling class starts being bribed. Same old story, Grand Dukes betraying Russia, French nobles selling up France, British nobility utterly worm-eaten by greed. And now the old United States of America dying off, 80 years after the sellout to Rothschild. Eighty years of usury taking, 80 years of grovelling before wealth, being ready to accept pay without ever thinkin' what causes it.
? Damn [it] all, I seem to be gittin' moral. Well, what about it? Be scientific, HOW much pizin' can the national body stand?
That question can be put scientifically, just as well as puttin' it in a hortatory form, or asking what is nice, or what ought a decent man do. No man will do anything WORTH doin' till some sense of "OUGHT" enters his system. Profit motive is silly, in the sense that it ultimately kills the good life; makes the mare go, yass, makes the mare go, money makes the mare go. And then somebody wakes up crazy. And that takes JUST long enough, so nobody notices what is going on. Suddenly wake up and find American abundance has been chucked out of the window. Ten billion here, ten billion there, and then ease has departed, and sailors don't care.
Saxony under the Kings of Poland had emitted bonds, Slauer that had fallen to 35%, reimburse 'em at par. The Congressmen who voted for assumption invented nothing, they were just being dirty. And all of 'em ought to have been shot. It's a long list. Tunis bonds. These particular kinds of swindle weren't invented in the new United States of America during the times of the early Congressional sessions. Just small town stuff, provincial villainy. Should we keep on after 160 years? Does it show political development?
What the United States lacks under the Morgenthau infamy is any sense that dirty swindles bring misery to thousands of people, hundreds of thousands, that we have risked something more than mere comfort.
My time is about up for this session. Ezra Pound speakin'.
And of course, you ought NOT to be in this war. Even to cover up the gross failure of the Administration to govern the United States of America, let alone fixing up the affairs of Europe and Asia.
? #50 (June 28, 1942) U. K. (B64) THE GIFTIE
It was Bobbie Burns, and no Englishman, who sent up his prayer: O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us
And the emotion behind the lines is probably more unEnglish than anyone who hasn't lived amongst it for over a decade can ever imagine.
I am having another go at it. And if wandering about Mayfair in 1916 the life of your ruling caste appeared to me perched on a very thin crust of painted cardboard, what must it seem now when looked at from OUTSIDE the circle of your tight little private world of illusion?
In those days I felt it, as I said, perched on a fragile crust, and my own brief role or my own feelin' rather that of John Baptist's poking up a scrawny head from the cellarage. Through the grill of some grating.
Some of you I do not name, because it would be too much like a family squabble. No malice on my part, but too much intimacy to be suitable to an international discussion of anything.
One cannot attack public figures when one has saved family photos from wreck and destruction. Or can you, or should you? That may be a case of conscience. Jezabel in her pram, and the rest of it.
I tell you once again, and I try to make myself, even with my peregrine accent, intelligible at least to some of you.
The wave of disgust that sweeps over the outer world at hearing some of your propaganda--after all, radio is the only free speech left--the wave of disgust is due to the absoLOOT falsity of your statements and of the assumptions underlying them. Even those of you who have been accustomed to the forgeries of your own high-hatted synagogue [must]
? shudder at some of the transmissions sent out by the cheap kikes of Schenectedy, New York, and Baastun.
The grease is laid on so thick by Mr. Churchill's [English] Hebrews and Mr. Roosevelt's American Hebrews. Can any of you, would any of you, as an exercise, as a mental setting-up exercise, be persuaded to look at some of your more piffling and prominent SERIOUS weeklies three or four months after the fact, just to gauge what IS fed you by your alleged intelligentzia?
You are NOT going to win this war. None of your best minds EVER thought you could win it. Nevertheless, your Alices still mince around on the other sides of their mirrors.
Mr. Cole, for example, known as Goddamhell Cole, Alice in person, the world after an Anglo-kike victory. Is it friendly to the people of England, is it friendly to ANYone to put up this false horizon? Are you all Zukor's employees?
You have never had a chance in this war. You had a chance possibly, at least from here it might at some time have appeared, did in fact appear that you had a chance for a beau geste, for a vindication of national honor by going thru a set of belicose motions, and sacrificing a reasonable number of men. Immolation of victims, as atonement not for the crimes of your empire, but for the imbecilities of the ruling gang and the bad, nay the wholly atrocious taste shown in putting up Eden.
An elderly colonel of my acquaintance volunteered to participate in a defense of Poland by air, for example. But that was NOT in the plans of your owners. Nothing but a protracted war and the maximum of profits on debt and gun sales suited your rulers. I don't mean your acknowledged rulers, I mean the creditors of your bullies and popinjays. The men back of the puppet show.
? And nothing HAS contented them save the most ignominious deliquescence of a great empire that history throws up on the screen of my memory. There may have been more ignominious ends. My studies have not been sufficiently extensive to enable me to recall them. Never have so many allies been let down by ANY one empire. Never have attacks on late allies been so notorious.
Never have the reasons for alliance been so base as those in your alliance with the Red butchers of wherever Stalin is resident at this moment. And never has the folly of a half wit been more flagrant than in the acts of your ostensible government.
As sheer imbecility, FIRST the policy against Italy, then that in entering a war on Japan. Truly the mind and intelligence are in small esteem among Britons.
By May 15 I was ready to mention your loss of Australia. I don't assert you have lost it, I merely wish to date the day on which I was ready to believe you were losing it. In fact after the Australian bombing of an American what was it, torpedo boat or something, I heard the murmur; hanno individuato il nemico. They, meaning the Aussies, have identified the enemy.
That was an exaggeration. You and the American people HAVE indeed an enemy, but the enemy wasn't on board that torpedo boat. The enemy is greed, avarice, usury, falsification incarnate in a group of unpleasant persons WHOM your intelligentzia, or your bloomsbury, or your professoriate, seems curiously unwilling to look at in the open light. ALLergic to all symptoms and indications. Allergic to justice whatever the other party in lite has interests opposed to what you have been taught were your own, but which sometimes WERE not.
FOR 25 years it has been apparent, and I dare say plenty of Europeans saw it before then, it has been apparent that the world could only be
? saved by a conspiracy of intelligent men, and that they would have to conspire AGAINST the Normans, the Sieffs and the Goldsmids, together with the minor lice over in Paris, the Iazards, Mandels and the rest of 'em.
AND your tolerated writers, your half witted socialists, your publicists, your Garvins, Beaverbunks, and the rest of 'em did NOT join such a conspiracy. You are barkin' up the wrong tree, and your bite has not proved very toothy, not if measured by Axis and Tripartite standards. Your smell, as caricatured in the Japanese papers, a couple of young ladies holding their noses. You are almost qualifying for ostracism. You can not, oh hell, you can't believe THAT.
You are such nice mannered people (when eh . . . nothing annoys you). Or as Charles Ricketts said: "No, people who are doing something for the world have NOT nice manners" (His own were a bit slinky). He continued: "The people who have these nice manners are the people the world is doing something FOR. "
Well how far off that seems, Ricketts and Shannon, the Haken [? ] press printing the works of Laforgue in the '90s. Alice in Wonderland, Mr. Cole, the denizens of the New Statesman and Nation. Don't believe me get the old copies, back from the lost era of January or February 1942, that is the year current.
Pomp of power, and so forth. When, gol drat it, WHEN you are wrong, when your chief ape has been wrong time and time over, does IT never enter your noddles, or noodles, to look for the source of error? Does it never begin to strike you that Margot Asquith is being unconsciously humorous when she writes-- --. If you hadn't been bred out of all thoroughness, if your thoroughbreds hadn't been decimated in three wars one after another, ALL [for the] power of Jewry, all piling up debt and debt interest. Repudiations, repudiations of debt, enormous burdens of tax needed according to your LYING and treacherous lackeys and
? professors and so called economists for service, or interest payment on DEBT, public, national, municipal and the rest of it.
COULD have been drug to the present pass. Would none of you have had the civic guts, the intellectual sphincter strength to organize SOMEthing, anything against Churchill's creditors? And the owners of BOTH your out-in-front parties? Morrison is a pup no cleaner than Winston, and just as fanciful and Mr. G. D. Hell Cole.
And as for your relations with the Arabian, Persian, and Mohammedan peoples? I trust none of my dearer friends are in service on those torrid frontiers.
For one drop of sincerity, for one voice on your air to say that the Emperor is NOT wearing clothes!
Yes, you will be left with the land of your island. Lymington and a few others may start a new hive. But you will have a very large population [and] no land space, unless you make some arrangement to ship a good deal of it out to Rhodesia. The question remains whether you will take measure to SELECT the stock that is to remain in old England. To see to it that the ENGLISH remain and the Yiddish go forth to Bolivia or wherever. And you will NOT do it on usury, you will not do it in contempt of all ethics, or of all fair knowledge of the nature of money, numisma.
A small state, a fascist state unless you like Stalin. That last phrase is not serious. England will NOT build tomorrow on the work system of the Stalin canal, but that will be thru no fault of Sieff, Goldsmid,-- --You will have to lay off your trappings, you will have to study new hygiene, you will have to give back their naturalization papers to the sweepings of Europe.
Let the Jews BUY a national home somewhere in your ruins. They have sold a good deal of Africa into serfdom; and NOT been nice to the
? ENGLISH who ventured on WORKING there, who went there to raise crops of food stuff. The usury system is unpleasant. The world is almightily ONTO that system. The Bu? rgermaster of Worgl, or in other words, common honesty, is of more use to Tomorrow's England than all the gold of the Indies or all the opium of the Sassoon, and the consequent revenues, concerning which Bobble Cecil can or should by now be able to supply ample details.
The effect of the B. B. C. transmissions is that, in the whole pack of their transmitters, there is no one who dares mention the Jewish problem, Brain Trust included. Probably lose their jobs if they tried, and what can be expected from a profession with Shaw and Wells at the top who think 24 hours a day of their incomes and of the truth at spare moments? Only England dare not mention the expulsion of Jews by Maria Theresa, nor England's blackmail of Maria Theresa, nor the Jews' relations with Cromwell. American radio is silent, partly from ignorance, the poor hicks just don't know any history, though a gang of foolish youngmen had the exuberance to get jailed for plotting to bump off all the Jew members of Congress. Had they succeeded, such is the American gangster and anarchist psychology that the only comment inside the United States would have been "and a damn good thing too. " (With echos in unspeaking England. ) The only place where anyone would have been shocked is in Italy, where there is a millennial conservatism and a prejudice against-- --.
#51 (July 2, 1942) U. S. (B65) DISBURSEMENT OF WISDOM
My friend F. Whiteside never tired of a very well known story of Chase and Whistler. For those of you to whom Chase's name is unfamiliar one may as well say that Whistler was a painter of very great talent. He had limitations, his drawing bothered him, some of his paint has now sunk into the canvas and the nuances he so labored may not last forever, but he was certainly one of the ornaments of his time, and with Henry James
? the two Americans who lit up the horizon of American youth at the turn of the century, and certainly some of his work will give joy to the elite as long as the canvas or paper remains.
Whereas Chase was, in painting, the equivalent of Harper's monthly magazine, Chase returned to the American like Howells, but on one occasion he disagreed with Jimmy, and on being kidded, he broke off: "I won't argue with you any longer. " To which Mr. Whistler with weary patience: "But, Chase, I am NOT arguing with you. I am just telling you. "
The Chinese have a more monumental exposition of the same theme: In evil time the sage can enjoy his own wisdom; when the land is well governed, the people benefit from his instructions.
Now apart from any national talents that I may or may not possess I have, first in poesy, and then in economics, which is one of the components of history, spent considerable more time and thought, and I do enjoy or suffer a thirst for knowledge which is, to put it mildly, above the common.
You are in a bloody mess. Bloody in more senses than that word has in British jargon. You are in a bloody MESS. Who got you there? Why did he do it? Does he know why he did it? Does he know HOW he dit it?
You have all of you been chicken-headed, frivolous, etc. You don't even know whether your various races of European origin will or CAN survive on a continent that has seen the fade-out of Mayas and Aztecs. And you have an ORGANIZED minority of a different race amongst you. A race that never tires, a race possessed of subcrocodilian vitality. And the lively lizard is "on this earth very antient" as huddy (W. H. Hudson) remarks of the condor and other predatory foul of the Andes.
AXIOM. Against an organized force of four or more, probably EIGHT million, a hundred individuals can NOT prevail until ORGANIZED. The
? sporadic efforts of a few excited young men are no use. The dilettante velleities of a few theorists are NO use. And the rest of the inhabitants of the United States can organize on ONE basis only, namely, that on which Europe has finally been constrained to organize its rebellion against the pervasive the ubiquitous Yidd. Pacts may be signed between the Pennsylvania Deitsch and the scrawny New Englander of British or Anglo-Scotch origin, but on no basis save that of race, and of allied more or less consanguineous races can you cohere.
You have, as opposed to any such projected order not merely the 4 or 8 million kikes in New York and points penetrated already. [From] New York to San Diego or wherever the pan hebe, the world Jewry, has set up a radio. Which is bloody well more than the rebellious British reformers were able to do in England during the four years before the betrayal of the British race by Churchill and Eden.
That being the vital point in the German program and the press being in the hands of kikery (high kike) and the subjugated servants of Jewry, some possibly only 1/2 or 1/3 conscious of what they were up to.
Religious base, no use; has been exploited. History of massacres re theology points [to the] downfall of Byzantium, as LONG as it was possible to stir up war on religious basis; that label was used to stir up strife.
Tacitus: Jews back, of persecution of early Christians. Fights in church between iconoclasts and the religious part of the church, down to the Germanic wars of religion. With the quite simple advice of the opponents, i. e. Jews, to THEIR component members; to GET into the church; get into the church, get into the prebends; to take holy orders and corrupt the church from inside (documented). Till you get the almost perfect instrument, Luther, both religious fanatic (on the question of the trinity, etc. ) and a very good politician, rebelling against being taxed by
? an ecciesiast central; already corrupted, and fallen into the hands of a banking family.
Religious base, no USE, that is written and proved over and over in European history which you do ill to ignore. Church split into fragments on one hand; and then any diplomatic representative of a foreign race can SO easily go thru the motions of getting converted.
Nothing new about that and the thin veil of observance, torn off in a jiffy whenever it seemed opportune even after centuries of pretending. No, no great hoax, that of combatting on religious base. Simple-minded European tribesmen fell for it, were weakened during about 1600 years, continual attrition. Wonder we're here at all. Must be something tough in European and Mediterranean fibre.
As to effects on, let us take a test tube specimen, France. According to some reckoning France had 38% of the population of the great powers in Louis XIV's time, 27% in 1789 and has 13% at present. I don't know just what powers are included in those figures, but on whatever calculation it has been made, it indicates a DECLINE.
Anyhow, religious basis NO use. What CAN you organize on?
Can't move 'em with a cold thing like economics. Marx advised fighting on economic basis. I still meet people who fall for that bit of eminently semitic strategy. For ONE HUNDRED years, simpletons and inexperienced young men have tried AS, damn it, my friends, of a dozen sects, economic sects; I tried ever since my kitten of mind got its eyes half open. And what came of it? Five thousand in prison, Wo? rgl, Alberta.
Yes, yes, we lily-livered humanitarians fussed 'round wantin' to cure the evil by honest accountancy; and we did NOT prevent this war.
I think my most obtuse opponent, or my most enthusiastic opponent, or Frankies' most faithful UNhappy warrior Archie MacLeish will admit that the reformers, the monetary reformers, the men who wanted honest
? functioning of the treasuries and of finance in England and America, did NOT prevent this war. (And damn lucky if they stave off the next one. ) Oh yes, the kahal makes 'em in series. SERIES technocracy, why waste the plant on ONE world calamity? The last one was nearly a world war.
The Talmud announced destruction of 75% of the goy. Yes, brother you have an OPPONENT. And what CAN you rely on? Dan Boone out shootin' squirrels. Hit 'em in the eye every time, but the Boone era, Daniel Boone era, has gone forever. The Boone era seems to have got mislaid for the moment. Prosperity has went, it has vamoosed. We wipp, nichishin, chippewa language has vanished with the pure injun dialects. Even the mixed idiom such as "que voulex you buju, nicichin" is no longer current on the Canadian frontier. And Henry James already noticed a change in New York phonetics.
On the seventh day gawd rested. I noted THAT even in [the] days of the Little Review. Either the European stock now resident in North America ORGANIZES or it sinks still deeper into the morass of high kikery. Its ideals and ideas have WENT. The structure of the Anglo-American landwidg is kufuzzled.
About 20 lost men in the United States DID notice the race problem, if not in time, at least in time to be read by Europeans who were really thinking about the WAY OUT. Undoubtedly it is pleasant to think that IF you get rid of capital system the Jew becomes harmless. That was oily Marx's bait, and what happens is the Stalin canal.
A FAKE elimination of capitalism, an attack of ALL civilization, even as much as had leaked into Russia. An attack on property, that is on private ownership of LAND, plows and bathtubs, but the USURER left in command. Not only have the nice and polite amongst us who TRIED to reform the hell of the stinking capitalist, i. e. , usury world, by honest accountancy, monetary and economic reform been shown up as ABSolootly incapable of gathering a mass of adherents powerful enough
? to DO anything, let alone resist a barbarian avalanche. BUT when capitalism has been dethroned etc. Slobody, Slobody for the fishes, open the fish breedin' tanks, in Slavic enthusiasm. That elimination of so called "capitalism" is merely used as a flail, a steamroller to crush out the rest of the non-chewish world, that is as much of it as it could ever run, in collusion with the decrepit, syphilitic, Sassonic, beCecil's sewage and mould of the British plutocracy.
The rot eating in since Cromwell, since the Constantinopolitan kikes were so INTerested in that damn hypocrite that they sent over an embassy to see if Cromwell was their Messiah. Much more in their line than the young fellow from Nazareth. I am not arguing, I am just telling you. One of these days you will have to start thinking about the problem of race, BREED, preservation.
I do NOT like to think of my race as going toward total extinction, NOR into absolute bondage.
The Cincinnati etc. erred from snobbery. They did not in George Washington's time organize on racial basis. No one thought of it, no one could have then thought of it. There WAS a racially homogeneous population in the newly freed colonies. Certain privileges were dear to the privileged. Snobbism is NOT conservative. Fashion is not conservative. La Mode, etc. is a ramp. Cf. with Hungarian and Roumanian peasant linen, one shirt or blouse lasts a life time, indestructable as real Chinese silk, "no can tear. "
That is what the advertising trade diddles you out of and you will have to think about Race.
#52 (July 6, 1942) U. S. (B66) CONTINUITY
? Had I the tongue of men and angels I should be unable to make sure that even the most faithful listeners would be able to hear and grasp the whole of a series of my talks.
That is the disadvantage of the radio form, and heaven knows when I shall be able to print these texts in book or books available to the American and English public. Book implying that [the] reader CAN, when he wishes, look back, take up the statement of the preface, see where Chapter X hitches onto Chapter I. Nevertheless you may as well make the effort to grasp at least the fact that there IS a sequence in what I am saying, and that the conversation of February coheres with that of April. And if you, you in Iowa, Wyoming, Connecticut, DON'T make that effort, if you don't listen and TRY to get [the] main threads and cables of what I am telling you, you will lose time.
Just as the writers who did NOT read the Little Review lost time. Many never made it up. There is no one of any literary size, or even pretenions among you who hasn't by now read the Little Review authors, or authors formed by the Little Review authors. Authors indebted to the Little Review and to its authors for their force, their take off, the initial jab that set 'em off.
Pity is that many got only a fragmentary view. Joyce and not Eliot, Eliot not W. Lewis. I hear a million Americans have taken advantage of Mr. Hemmingway's last production, and so they ought to. TWO million ought to read it (probably . . . I haven't yet seen a copy but that is due to conditions of Atlantic transport).
PITY is that there is so much else, so much essential else that they are unblissfully UNaware of. And I honestly do not know where they can get essential parts of that else, except from my broadcasts. And out of them, out of these talks, the young men in England and America will have to build their souls, or at least their minds for tomorrow, or LOSE time, never get into life at all.
? They will not be tomorrow's Hemingways, or even today's Clark Gables. They will be just shelved, left on the cupboard floor, this way inglorious and ungloried, back numbers before they are dated. Like neo- Georgians who read Mr. Eliot 15 or 26 years late, and tried to cut little nitches in his umbrageous cathedral, mouse holes in his choir stall.
And after a hundred broadcasts it is STILL hard to know where to begin. There is so MUCH that the United States does not know. This war is [the] fruit of such vast incomprehensions, such tangled ignorance, so many strains of unknowing.
I am held up, enraged, by the delay needed to change a typing ribbon, so much is there that OUGHT to be put into the young American head. Don't know which, what to put down, can't write two scripts at once. NECESSARY facts, ideas, come in pell-mell. I try to get too much into ten minutes. Condensed form O. K. in book, saves eyesight, reader can turn back, can look at a summary. Mebbe if I had more sense of form, legal training, God knows what, could get the matter across the Atlantic, or the bally old channel. Art, economics, pathology. You need to know MORE about all of 'em. Need to GIT out of this war, need to stay out of, or prevent the next one, need to change the stinkin' old system.
ROT in art, art as pathology, university delays. How come class war? What is it the professors don't know? Got to choose between two or four subjects or I will git nothing over in any one talk. Very well. I will start on: How come. Two bits of ignorance that have recently been rubbed into me by a mob or congress of professorial persons. NO . . . let's start on something that HAS been discussed IN America for twenty years, 30 years, Doctor looks at literature. All this quite silly talk about the diseased mind back of modern painting.
It bored me like hell. It was mostly poor stuff. BUT the fault lay in its limitation AS criticism, not in the main worry that caused half educated
? medicos to go into it. What was wrong with the criticism was lack of proportion.
HEALTH is MORE interesting than disease. Health is TOTAL. Beauty is MORE interesting than distortion.
We have most of us been buffaloed, or at any rate the intelligentsia is mostly an ass. NOT from having no brains, but simply from partialism in the original sense of that word. Intelligentsia is mostly a nuisance because it runs on snobisms and fragments.
At [the] age of 15 a consumptive gave me a copy of Salome? with Beardsley's illustrations. I cut 'em out, they were so ugly. But for more than ten years of my life I considered this an act of genuine fanaticism. I came to see the . . . damn it all, call 'em merits of Beardsley's distortions.
GROANS from the effete, elite and superior sophomores.
Later a distorted but amiable female presented me coyly with an inferior Beardsley, that is, a volume of distortions by a pink nailed esthete. The significance of THAT act was apparent even to me. I don't think it was conscious on her part. The book probably gave her relief or comfort that she could not have derived from Praxiteles or Botticelli. At any rate I was older, and the drawings weren't even good Beardsley. AND I wasn't interested in pathology. So I have never mentioned the incident before.
The medicos who started worrying about the disease behind modern art were right. That is, they were RIGHT to worry. They were mostly silly in their statements of detail, and this was due to ignorance, lack of cultural heritage. But they were on the right line.
I affirm that future art criticism will be able to tell the component of usury tolerance. How far the TOLERANCE of usury prevailed, or did not prevail when a given picture was painted. Sense of design, precision of LINE, will give way to interest in detail. Suggestion of luxury will
? augment as people lose an ethical basis of life, as they lose passion for justice, love of real distinction between one idea and another. Diagnosis will replace love, analysis will give way to squalor. There are steps and slopes downward toward Avernus, falsification will enter. Honest men, when a dogma or style has been falsified, will turn analytic. They will be partial, the first ones emphatic and vigorous. They will aim, that is, the best ones will aim at health.
For example, Manet, fed up with falsification of color in painting, Manet reduced to analysis of light and color. Both making distinct contributions to world art. Manet one of the world's greatest.
But what is temperament in a sound man becomes by excess, disease in a weak man. Unbalance, hard to divide at certain point, and if one drifts with the current, one grows tolerant first of weakness, and then accustomed to weakness, and then plops into squalor.
Mediterranean sanity and beauty, order. TO KALON, the world was saner when the cult of ugliness did NOT engage the attentions of anyone.
I know all about chocolate box, pseudo beauty, etc. BUT a deflection of the AIM is a decadence. It is a false ripening, it is green fruit going rotten. Beardsley was a sick man, knew he had to make a name quick if he wanted to make it. Personal wish, NOT belief in what art is or ought to be. Knew he hadn't time to learn to PAINT. HIS sane youthful impulse was to pre-Raphealite beauty. Early drawings, Burne-Jones, that's what he WANTED.
Yeats asked him why he hadn't stuck to it. Beardsley was no slouch, he was a courageous invalid. He was a heroic invalid, up to the point of his force. He didn't lie to himself nor to his friends in private. He answered:
Beauty is so DIFFICULT.
? We have all seen the cult of beauty turn to slop. Esthete: an artist who won't take pains, who will NOT face the work needed to paint a good picture, or write a good novel or poem. All fragmentary, nothing total. And the GREAT perversion, the great decadence, when the painting is made to sell, when the artist stops wanting to live. Worth his hire, MUST eat, but EAT secondary AS desire, to will to paint, or to make. Then to git rich, that is the END, the absoloot end of a painter. Few men can resist the lure, we all like comfort. That is my weakness and I have seen men who can do without it. I know no American will much believe that, and some of the men who can do without it are lunatics and fanatics. And snobbism doth make coneys of them all. So far as I know, nobody else had the courage to point out that the German pavilions at the Binennale di Venezia four years ago was the best. All the little daubers in the shops, doing Monet and Renoir 60 years late were shocked by the hardness of outline. It was almost the only pavilion not rotted with slobber, some more, some less.
The futurist rooms are always an affirmation of propaganda that could get along by itself without any painting whatever. I mean the main line of futurist propaganda is an idea, the painting an adjunct.
