No More Learning

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. TheChel- sea artists are much less flimsy. The Quakers are powerful rascals. You represent, my Hobson, the dregs of Anglo-Saxon civilization! There is nothing softer on earth. --Your flabby potion is a mixture of the lees of Liberalism, the poor froth blown off the decadent nine- ties, the wardrobe-leavings of a vulgar Bohemianism with its headqviarters in Chelsea
"You are concentrated, systematic slop. --There is nothing in the universe to be said for you. . . .
"A breed of mild pervasive cabbages, has set up a wide and creeping rot in the West of Europe. --They make it indirectly a peril and a tribulation for live things to remain in the neighborhood. You are a systematiz- ing and vulgarizing of the individual. --You are not an
? IN THE VORTEX 221
surrounds him with an enveloping dreariness, and im- pairts his characters by long-drawn osmosis.
Hobson is a minor character in the book, he and
Lowndes are little more than a prologue, a dusty avenue
of approach to the real business of the book: Bertha,
"high standard Aryan female, in good condition, superbly
made; of the succulent, obedient, clear peasant
. "
type.
Kreisler, the main character in the book, a "powerful"
study in sheer obsessed emotionality, the chief foil to Tarr who has, over and above his sombre emotional spawn-bed, a smouldering sort of intelligence, combusti- ble into brilliant talk, and brilliant invective.
Anastasya, a sort of super-Bertha, designated by the author as "swagger sex. "
These four figures move, lit by the flare of restau- rants and cafes, against the frowsy background of "BourgeoisBohemia,"moreorlessBloomsbury. There are probably such Bloomsburys in Paris and in every large city.
This sort of catalogue is not well designed to interest the general reader. What matters is the handling, the vigor, even the violence, of the handling.
The book's interest is riot due to the "style" in so far as "style" is generally taken to mean "smoothness of finish," orderly arrangement of sentences, coherence to the Flaubertian method.
It is due to the fact that we have here a highly-ener- gized mind performing a huge act of scavenging; clean- ing up a great lot of rubbish, cultural, Bohemian, romantico-Tennysonish, arty, societish, gutterish.
It is not an attack on the Spicier. It is an attack on a sort of super-^icier desiccation. It is by no means a tract. If Hobson is so drawn as to disgust one with the
. .
? 222 INSTIGATIONS
"stuffed-shirt," Kreisler is equally a sign-post pointing to the advisability of some sort of intellectual or at least commonsense management of the emotions.
Tarr, and even Kreisler, is very nearly justified by the depiction of the Bourgeois Bohemian fustiness: Frau- lein Lippmann, Fraulein Fogs, etc.
What we are blessedly free from is the red-plush '^ Wellsianillusionism,andtheclickofMr. Bennett'scash- register finish. The book does not skim over the sur- face. If it does not satisfy the mannequin demand for "beauty" it at least refuses to accept margarine substi- tutes. It will not be praised by Katherine Tynan, nor byMr. ChestertonandMrs. Meynell. Itwillnotreceive / the sanction of Dr. Sir Robertson Nicoll, nor of his
despicable paper "The Bookman. "
(There will be perhaps some hope for the British
reading public, when said paper is no longer to be found in the Public Libraries of the Island, and when Clement Shorter shall cease from animadverting. ) "Tarr" does not appeal to these people nor to the audience which they have swaddled. Neither, of course, did Samuel
, Butler to their equivalents in past decades.
"Bertha and Tarr took a flat in the Boulevard Port Royal, not far from the Jardin des Plantes. They gave a party to which Fraulein Lippmann and a good many other people came. He maintained the rule of four to seven, roughly, for Bertha, with the uttennost punctili-
ousness. AnastasyaandBerthadidnotmeet. "Bertha's child came, and absorbed her energies for upwards of a year. It bore some resemblance to Tarr. Tarr's afternoon visits became less frequent. He lived
now publicly with his illicit and splendid bride.
"Two years after the birth of the child, Bertha divorced Tarr. She then married an eye-doctor, and
? IN THE VORTEX 22?
lived with a brooding seveifity in his company, and that of her only child.
"Tarr and Anastasya did not marry. They had no c&ildren. Tarr, however, had three children by a Lady of the name of Rose Fawdett, who consoled him even- tuallyforthesplendorsofhis'perfectwoman. ' Butyet beyond the dim though sordid figure of Rose Fawcett, another rises. This one represents the swing-back of the pendulum once more to the swagger side. The cheerless and stodgy absurdity of Rose Fawcett re- quired the painted, fine and inquiring face of Prism Dirkes. "
Neither this well-writen conclusion, nor the opening tirade I have quoted, give the full impression of the book's vital quality, but they may perhaps draw the explorative reader.
"Tarr" finds sex a monstrosity, he finds it "a German study": "Sex, Hobson, is a German study. A German study. "
At that we may leave it. "Tarr" "had no social ma- chinery, but the cumbrous one of the intellect. . . . When he tried to be amiably he usually only succeeded in being ominous. "
"Tarr" really gets at something in his last long dis- cussion with Anastasya, when he says that art "has no inside. " This is a condition of art, "to have no inside> nothing you cannot see. It is not something impelled like a machine by a little egoistic inside. "
"Deadness, in the limited sense in which we use that word, is the first condition of. art. The second is absence of soul, in the sentimental human sense. The lines and masses of a statue are its soul. "
Joyce says something of the sort very differently, he is full of technical scholastic terms : "stasis, kinesis," etc.
1/
? 224 INSTIGATIONS
Any careful statement of this sort is bound to be baffoui, and fumbled over, but this ability to come to a hard definition of anything is one of Lewis' qualities lying at the base of his ability to irritate the mediocre intelli- gence. The book was written before 1914, but the de- piction of the German was not a piece of war propa- ganda.
AN HISTORICAL ESSAYIST
LYTTON STRACHEY ON LEFT-OVER CELEBRITY
Mr. Strachey, acting as funeral director for a group of bloated reputations, is a welcome addition to the small group of men who continue what Samuel Butler began. ThehowlsgoingupintheTimesLit. Sup. from the descendants of the ossements are but one curl more of incense to the new author.
His book is a series of epitomes, even the illustrations, from the peculiar expression of Mr. Gladstone's rascally face to the differently, but equally, peculiar expression of Newman's and the petrified settled fanatic will-to- power in Cardinal Manning's, are epitomes.
Whatever else we may be sure of, we may be sure that no age with any intellectual under-pinnings would have made so much fuss over these "figures. " For most of us, the odor of defunct Victoriania is so unpleasant and the personal benefits to be derived from a study of the period so small that we are content to leave the past where we find it, or to groan at its leavings as they are, week by week, tossed up in the Conservative papers. The Victorian era is like a stuffy alley-way which we can, for the most part, avoid. We do not agitate for its
? IN THE VORTEX 225
destruction, because it does not greatly concern us; at least, we have no feeling of responsibility, we are glad to have moved on toward the open, or at least toward the patescent, or to have found solace in the classics or in eighteenth century liberations.
Mr. Strachey, with perhaps the onus of feeling that the "Spectator" was somewhere in his immediate family, has been driven into patient exposition. The heavy gas of the past decades cannot be dispersed by mere "BLASTS" and explosions. Mr. Strachey has under- taken a chemical dispersal of residues.
At the age of nine Manning devoured the Apocalypse. He read Paley at Harrow, and he never got over it. Impeded in a political career, he was told that the King- domofHeavenwasopentohim. "Heavenlyambitions" were suggested. The "Oxford Movement" was, in a minor way, almost as bad as the Italian Counter- Reformation. Zeal was prized more than experience. Manning was the child of his age, the enfant prodigue of it, who could take advantage of all its blessings. A fury of "religion" appears to have blazed through the period. This fury must be carefully distinguished from theology, which latter is an elaborate intellectual exer- cise, and can in its finest developnients be used for sharpening the wits, developing the rational faculties {vide Aquinas). Theology, straying from the en- closures of religion, enters the purlieus of philosophy, and in some cases exacts stiff definitions.
Froude, Newman and Keble were part of an unfor- tunate retrogression, or, as Mr. Strachey has written, "Christianity had become entangled in a series of un- fortunate circumstances from which it was the plain duty of Newman and his friends to rescue it. " Keble de- sired an England "more superstitious, more bigoted.
? 226 INSTIGATIONS
more gloomy, more fierce in its religion. " Tracts for tlie Times were published. Pusey imagined that people practised fasting. It was a curious period. One should take it at length from Mr. Strachey.
The contemporary mind may well fail to note a dif- ference between these retrogradists and the earlier nuisance John Calvin, who conceived the floors of hell paved with unbaptized infants half a span long. Mr. Strachey's patient exposition will put them right in the matter.
We have forgotten how bad it was, the ideas of the Oxford movement have faded out of our class, or at least the free moving men of letters meet no one still em- bedded in these left-overs. Intent on some system of thought interesting to themselves and their friends, they "lose touch with the public. " And the "public," as soon as it is of any size, is full of these left-overs, full of the taste of F. T. Palgrave, of Keble's and Pusey's religion.
To ascertain the under-side of popular opinion, or I had better say popular assumption, one may do worse than read books of a period just old enough to appear intolerable.
(For example, if you wish to understand tlie taste displayed in the official literature of the last administra- tion you must read anthologies printed between 1785 and 1837. )
Mr. Strachey's study of Manning is particularly valu- able in a time when people still persist in not under- standing the Papal church as a political organization ex- ploitingareligion; itsforce,doubtless,hascome,through the centuries, from men like Manning, balked in political careers, suffering from a "complex" of power-lust.
Among Strachey's "Eminent" we find one common characteristic, a sort of mulish persistence in any course,
? IN THE VORTEX 227
however stupid. One might , develop the proposition that Nietzsche in his will-to-power "philosophy" was no more than the sentimental, inefficient German of the "old type" expressing an idolization of the British Vic- torian character.
Still it is hard to see how any people save those chr liaiino perduto il hen del intelletto
could have swallowed such shell-game propositions as those of Manning's, quoted on p. 08. concerning response to prayer.
The next essay is a very different matter. Mr. . Strachey, without abandoning the acridity of his style, exposes Florence Nightingale as a great constructor of civilization. Her achievement remains, early victim of Christian voodooism, surrounded mainly by cads and imbeciles, it is a wonder her temper was not a great deal worse. She may well be pardoned a few hysterias, a few metaphysical bees in her cap. Even in meta- physics, if she was unable to improve on Confucius and Epicurus, she seems to have been quite as intelligent as many of her celebrated contemporaries who had no more solid basis for reputation than their "philosophic" writing. Our author has so branded Lord Stratford de Redcliffe and the physican Hall that no amount of apologiawillreinstatethem. Panmureisleftasagoose, and Hawes as a goose with a touch of malevolence.
Queen \'ictoria appears several times in this essay, and effectively:
" 'It will be a very great satisfaction to me,' Her Majesty added, 'to make the acquaintance of one who has set so bright an example to our sex. "
"The brooch, which was designed by the Prince Con-
"
? 228 WSTIGATIONS
sort, bore a St. George's cross in red enamel, and the Royalcyphersurmountedbydiamonds. Thewholewas encircled by the inscription, 'Blessed are the Merciful. '
Dr. Arnold of Rugby, to be as brief as possible with a none too pleasant subject, "substituted character for intellect in the training of British youth. "
The nineteenth century had a "letch" for unifications, it believed that, in general, "all is one"; when this doc- trine failed of a sort of pragmatic sanction in rem, it tried to reduce things to the least possible number. True, in the physical world, it did not attempt to use steam and dynamite interchangeably, but, in affairs of the mind, such was the indubitable tendency.
It is, however, a folly to "substitute" character for intelligence and one would rather have been at the Grammar-School of Ashford, in Kent, in 1759, under Stephen Barrett, A. M. , than at Rugby, in 1830, under Dr. Arnold, or, later, under any of his successors. And I give thanks to Zeusocns tot' ialv, that being an Ameri- can, I have escaped the British public school. Mrs. Ward is at liberty to write to the Times as much as she likes, I do not envy her Dr. Arnold for grandfather.
Arnold stands pre-eminent as an "educator," and from him the term has gradually taken its present meaning: "a man with no intellectual interests. "
Mr. Strachey completes his volume with a study of that extraordinarycrank. GeneralGordon. Ittakeshimtwo lines to blast the reputation of Lord Elgin. He does it quietly, but Elgin's name will stink in the memory of the reader. It is difficult to attribute this wholly to the author, for the facts are in connivance with him. But if his irony at times descends to sarcasm, one must balance that with the general quietude of his style. One canbuthopethatthisbookwillnotbehislast; onewould
? IN THE VORTEX 229
welcome a treatment, by him, of The Members of the British Academic Committee, British Publishers, The Asquith Administration.
The religion of Tien Wang mentioned on p. 221 ap- pears to have been as intelligent as any other form of Christianity, and to have had much the same active ef- fects. However, Gordon was appointed to oppose it. Throughout the rest of his life he seems to have been obsessed by the curious medijeval fallacy that the world is vanity and the body but ashes and dust. He fell vic- tim to the exaggerated monotheism of his era. But he'
had the sense to follow his instinct in a period when instincts were not thought quite respectable; this made him an historic figure; it also must have lent him great charm (with perhaps rather picturesque drawbacks). This valuable quality, charm, must have been singularly lacking in Mr. Gladstone.
It is, indeed, difficult to restrain one's growing con- viction that Mr. Gladstone was not all his party had hoped for. Gordon was "difficult," at the time of his last expedition he was perhaps little better than a lunatic, but Gladstone was decidedly unpleasant.
In all of the eminent was the quality of a singularly uncritical era.
It was a time when a prominent man could iorm himself on a single volume handed to him by "tradition"; when illiteracy, in the profounder sense of that term, was no drawback to a vast public career. (An era, of course, happily closed. )
I do not know that there is much use enquiring into the causes of the Victorian era, or any good to be got from speculations. Its disease might seem to have been an aggravated form of provincialism. ^Professor Sir Henry Newbolt has recently pointed out that the English
? 230 INSTIGATIONS
public is "interested in politics rather than literature"; this may be a lingering symptom.
If one sought, not perhaps to exonerate, but to explain the Victorian era one might find some contributory cause in Napoleon. That is to say, the Napoleonic wars had made Europe unpleasant, England was sensibly glad to be insular. Geography leaked over into mentality. Eighteenth century thought had indeed got rid of the Bourbons, but later events had shown that eighteenth century thought might be dangerous. England cut off herintellectualcommunicationswiththeContinent. An eraofbigotrysupervened. Wehavesothoroughlyfor- gotten, if we ever knew, the mental conditions preced- ing the Victorian era, save perhaps as they appear in the scribblings of, let us say, Lady Blessington, that we cannot tell whether the mentality of the Victorian reign was an advance or an appalling retrogression. In any casewearegladtobeoutofit . . . irregardlessofwhat wemaybeinto; irregardlessofwhetherthecommunica- tions among intelligent people are but the mirage of a minute Thebaid seen from a chaos wholly insuperable. *
A LIST OF BOOKS
When circumstances have permitted me to lift up my prayer to the gods, of whom there are several, and whose multiplicity has only been forgotten during the less felicitous periods, I have requested for contem- porary use, some system of delayed book reviewing, some system whereby the critic of current things is per- mitted to state that a few books read with pleasure five or six years ago can still be with pleasure perused, and
* "Eminent Victorians," by Lytton Strachey.
? IN THE VORTEX 231
that their claims to status as literature have not been obliterated by half or all of a decade.
GEORGE S. STREET
There was in the nineties, the late nineties and dur- ing the early years of this century, and still is, a writer named George S. Street. He has written some of the best things that have been' thought concerning Lord Byron, he has written them not as a romanticist, not as a Presbyterian, but as a man of good sense. They are worthy of commendation. He has written charm- ingly in criticism of eighteenth century writers, and of the ghosts of an earlier Piccadilly. He has written tales of contemporary life with a suavity, wherefrom the present writer at least has learned a good deal, even if he has not yet put it into scriptorial practice. (I haste to state this indebtedness. )
The writers of moeurs contemporaines are so few, or rather there are so few of them who can be treated under the heading "literature," that the discovery or circula- tion of any such writer is no mean critical action. Mr. Street is "quite as amusing as Stockton," with the infinite difference that Mr. Street has made literature. Essays upon him are not infrequent in volumes of English essays dealing with contemporary authors. My impres- sion is that he is not widely read in America (his pub- lishers will doubtless put me right if this impression is erroneous) ; I can only conclude that the possession of a style, the use of a suave and pellucid English has erected some sort of barrier.
"The Trials of the Bantocks," "The Wise and the Wayward," "The Ghosts of Piccadilly," "Books of Essays," "The Autobiography of a Boy," "Quales Ego,"
? 232 INSTIGATIONS
"Miniatures and Moods," are among his works, and in them the rare but intelligent reader may take refuge from the imbecilities of the multitude.
FREDERIC MANNING
In 1910 Mr. Manning published, with the almost de- funct and wholly uncommendable firm of John Murray, "Scenes and Portraits," the opening paragraph of which I can still, I believe, quote from memory.
"When Merodach, King of Uruk, sat down to his meals, he made his enemies his footstool, for be- neath his table he kept an hundred kings with their thumbs and great toes cut off, as signs of his power andclemency. WhenMerodachhadfinishedeating he shook the crumbs from his napkin, and the kings fed themselves with two fingers, and when Merodach observed how painful and difficult this operation was, he praised God for having given thumbs to man.
" 'It is by the absence of things,' he said, 'that we learn their use. Thus if we deprive a man of his eyes we deprive him of sight, and in this man- ner we learn that sight is the function of the eyes. '
"Thus spake Merodach, for he had a scientific mind and was curious of God's handiwork. And when he had finished speaking, his courtiers ap- plauded him. "
Adam is afterwards discovered trespassing in Mero- dach's garden or paradise. The characters of Bagoas, Merodach's high priest, Adam, Eve and the Princess Candace are all admirably presented. The book is divided in six parts: the incident of the Kingdom of
? IN THE VORTEX 233
Uruk, a conversation at the house of Euripides, "A Friend of Paul," a conversation between St. Francis and the Pope, another between Thomas Cromwell and Macchiavelli, and a final encounter between Leo XIII and Renan in Paradise.
This book is not to be neglected by the intelligent reader (avis rarissima, and in what minute ratio to the population I am still unable to discern).
"Others" Anthology for 1917. This last gives, I think, the first adequate presentation of Mina Loy and Marianne Moore, who have, without exaggerated '"nationalism," without waving of banners and general phrases about Columbia gem of the ocean, succeeded in, or fallen into, producing something distinctly American in quality, not merely distinguishable as American by reason of current national faults.
Their work is neither simple, sensuous nor passionate, but as we are no longer governed by the North American Review we need not condemn poems merely because they do not fit some stock phrase or rhetorical criticism.
(For example, an infinitely greater artist than Tenny- son uses six "s's" and one "z" in a single line. It is one of the most musical lines in Provencal and opens a poem especiallycommendedbyDante. Letusleavetherealm of promoted typists who quote the stock phrases of text-books. )
In the verse of Marianne Moore I detect traces of emotion; inthatofMinaLoyIdetectnoemotionwhat- ever. Both of these women are, possibly in unconscious- ness, among the. followers of Jules Laforgue (whose work shows a great deal of emotion) . Or perhaps Rene Ghil is the "influence" in Miss Moore's case. It is pos- sible, as I have written, or intended to write elsewhere, to
? 234 INSTIGATIONS
divide poetry into three sorts: (i) melopoeia, to wit, poetry whicfi moves by its music, whether it be a music in words or an aptitude for, or suggestion of, accom- panying music; (2) imagism, or poetry wherein the feelings of painting and sculpture- are predominant (cer- tain men move in phantasmagoria; the images of their gods, whole countrysides, stretches of hill land and forest, travel with them) ; and there is, thirdly, logopoeia, or poetry that is akin to nothing but language which is a dance of the intelligence among words and ideas and modifications of ideas and characters. Pope and the eighteenth-century writers had in this medium a certain limitedrange. TheintelligenceofLaforgueranthrough the whole gamut of his time. T. S. Eliot has gone on with it. Browning wrote a condensed form of drama, full of things of the senses, scarcely ever pure logopoeia.
One wonders what the devil any one will make of this sort of thing who has not in their wit all the clues. It has none of the stupidity beloved of the "lyric" en- thusiast, and the writer and reader who take refuge in scenery, description of nature, because they are unable to cope with the human. These two contributors to the "Others" Anthology write logopoeia. It is, in their case, the utterance of clever people in despair, or hover- ing upon the brink of that precipice. It is of those who have acceded with Renan "La betise humain6 est la seule chose qui donne une idee de I'infini. " It is a mind cry, more than a heart cry. "Take the world if thou wilt but leave me an asylum for my affection," is not their lamentation, but rather "In the midst of this desolation, give me at least one intelligence to converse with. "
The arid clarity, not without its own beauty, of le temperament de I'Americaine, is in the poems of these, I think, graduates or post-graduates. If they have not
? IN THE VORTEX 235
received B. A. 's or M. A. 's or B. Sc. 's they do not need them.
The point of my praise, for I intend this as praise, even if I do not burst into the phrases of Victor Hugo, is that without any pretences and without clamors about nationality, these girls have written a distinctly national product, they have written something which would not have come out of any other country, and (while I have before now seen a deal of rubbish by both of them) they are, as selected by Mr. Kreymborg, interesting and readable (by me, that is. I am aware that even the poems before me would drive numerous not wholly un- intelligent readers into a fury of rage-out-of-puzzle-
ment. ) Both these poetriae have said a number of things not to be found in the current numbers of Every- body's,theCenturyorMcClure's. "TheEffectualMar- riage," "French Peacock," "My Apish Cousins," have each in its way given me pleasure. Miss Moore has already prewritten her cbunterblast to my criticism in her poem "to a Steam Roller. "
The anthology displays also Mr. Williams' praise- worthy opacity.
THE NEW POETRY
English and French literature have stood in constant need of each other, and it is interesting to note, as con- current but in no way dependent upon the present alli- ance, a new French vitality among our younger writers of poetry. As some of these latter are too new to presuppose the reader's familiarity with them, I quote a few poems before venturing to open a discussion. T. S. Eliot is the most finished, the most composed of these poets; kt us observe his poem "The Hippopota- mus," as it appears in The Little Review.
--.
? 236
INSTIGATIONS The Hippopotamus
The broad backed hippopotamus Rests on his belly in the mud; Although he seems so firm to us. . , . Yet he is merely flesh and blood.
Flesh-and-blood is weak and frail, Susceptible to nervous shock; While the True Qiurch can never fail For it is based upon a rock.
The hippo's feeble steps may err
In compassing material ends,
While the True Church need never stir To gather in its dividends.
The potamus can never reach
The mango on the mango-tree,
But fruits of pomegranate and peach Refresh the Church from over sea.
At mating time the hippo's voice Betrays inflexions hoarse and odd. But every week we hear rejoice The Church, at being one with God.
The hippopotamus's day
Is past in sleep; at night he hunts; God works in a mysterious way
The Church can sleep and feed at once
? IN THE VORTEX 237
I saw the potamus take wing Ascending from the damp savannas, And quiring angels round him sing The praise of God, in loud hosannas.
Blood of the Lamb shall wash him clean And him shall heavenly arms enfold, Among the saints he shall be seen Performing on a harp of gold.
He shall be washed as white as snow, By all the martyr'd virgins kist. While the True Church remains below Wrapt in the old miasmal mist.
This cold sardonic statement is definitely of the school of Theophile Gautier; as definitely as Eliot's "Conversa- tion Galante" is in the manner of Jules Laforgue. There is a great deal in the rest of Mr. Eliot's poetry which is personal, and in no wise derivative either from the French or from Webster and Tourneur just as there
;
is in "The Hippopotamus" a great deal which is not Theophile Gautier. I quote the two present poems sim- ply to emphasize a certain lineage and certain French virtues and qualities, which are, to put it most mildly, a great and blessed relief after the official dullness and Wordsworthian lignification of the "Georgian" Antholo- gies and their descendants and derivatives as upheld by The New Statesman, that nadir of the planet of hebe- tude, that apogee of the kulturesque.
Conversation Galante*
I observe: "Our sentimental friend the moon! Or possibly (fantastic, I confess)
From "Prufrock. " By T. S. Eliot. Egoist, Ltd.
--!
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INSTIGATIONS
It may be Prester John's balloon
Or an old battered lantern hung aloft
To light poor travelers to their distress. "
She then: "How you digress! "
And I then: "Some one frames upon the keys That exquisite nocturne, with which we explain The night and moonshine, music which we seize To body forth our own vacuity. "
She then: "Does this refer to me? " "Oh no, it is I who am inane. "
"You, madam, are the eternal humorist.
The eternal enemy of the absolute.
Giving our vagrant moods the slightest twist With your air indifferent and imperious
At a stroke our mad poetics to confute And----: "Are we then so serious? "
"
Laforgue's influehce or Ghil's or some kindred ten- dency is present in the whimsicalities of Marianne Moore, and of Mina Loy. A verbalism less finished than Eliot's appears in Miss Moore's verses called
Pedantic Literalist
Prince Rupert's drop, paper muslin ghost. White torch "with power to say unkind
Things with kindness and the most Irritating things in the midst of love and
Tears," you invite destruction.
You are like the meditative man With the perfunctory heart; its
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239
Carved cordiality ran
To and fro at first, like an inlaid and royal
Immutable production;
Then afterward "neglected to be Painful" and "deluded him with
Loitering formality,
Doing its duty as if it did not,"
Presenting an obstruction
To the motive that it served. What stood Erectinyouhaswithered. A
Little "palmtree of turned wood"
Informs your once spontaneous core in its
Immutable reduction.
The reader accustomed only to glutinous imitations of Keats, diaphanous dilutations of Shelley, woolly Wordsworthian paraphrases, or swishful Swinburniania will doubtless dart back appalled by Miss Moore's de- partures from custom; custom, that is, as the male or female devotee of Palgravian insularity understands that highlyelasticterm. ThePalgravianwillthenwithdis- appointment discover that his favorite and conventional whine is inapplicable. Miss Moore "rhymes in places. " Her versification does not fit in with preconceived notions of vers litre. It possesses a strophic structure. The elderly Newboltian groans. The all-wool un- bleachedGeorgiansighsominously. Anotherauthorhas been reading French poets, and using words for the communication of thought. Alas, times will not stay anchored.
Mina Loy has been equally subject to something like internationalinfluence; therearelinesinher"Ineffectual
--
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Marriage" perhaps better written than anything I have found in Miss Moore, as, for example:
"So here we might dispense with her Gina being a female
But she was more than that
Being an incipience a correlative an instigation to the reaction of man From the palpable to the transcendent Mollescent irritant of his fantasy
Gina had her use Being useful contentedly conscious
She flowered in Empyrean
From which no well-mated woman ever returns
Sundays a warm light in the parlor From the gritty road on the white wall anybody could see it
Shimmered a composite effigy
Madonna crinolined a man hidden beneath her hoop.
Patience said Gina is an attribute >> And she learned at any hour to offer The dish appropriately delectable
What had Miovanni made of his ego
In his library
What had Gina wondered among the pots and
pans
One never asked the other. "
? IN THE VORTEX 241
These lines are not written as Henry Davray said re- cently in the "Mercure de France," that the last "Geor- gian Anthology" poems are written, i. e. , in search for "sentiments pour les accommoder a leur vocabulaire. " Miss Loy's are distinctly the opposite, they are words set down to convey a definite meaning, and words accom- modated to that meaning, even if they do not copy the mannerisms of the five or six by no means impeccable nineteenth century poets whom the British Poetry Society has decided to imitate.
All this is very pleasing, or very displeasing, accord- ing to the taste of the reader; according to his freedom from, or his bondage to, custom.
Distinct and as different as possible from the orderly statements of Eliot, and from the slightly acid whimsi- calities of these ladies, are the poems of Carlos Williams. If the sinuosities and mental quirks of Misses Moore and Loy are difficult to follow I do not know what is to be said for , some of Mr. Williams' ramifications and abruptnesses. I do not pretend to follow all of his volts, jerks, sulks, balks, outblurts and jump-overs; but for . all his roughness there remains with me the con- viction that there is nothing meaningless in his book, "Al que quiere," not a line. There is whimsicality as we found it in his earlier poems. "The Tempers" (pub- lished by Elkin Mathews), in the verse to "The Coro-
ner's Children," for example. There is distinctness and color, as was shown in his "Postlude," in "Des Im- agistes" ; but there is beyond these qualities the absolute conviction of a man with his feet on the soil, on a soil personally and peculiarly his own. He is rooted. He is at times almost inarticulate, but he is never dry, never without sap in abundance. His course 'may be well indicated by the change of the last few years ; we found
--
? 242 INSTIGATIONS
him six years ago in "The Postlude," full of a thick and opaque color, full of emotional richness, with a maxi- mum of subjective reality:
POSTLXTOE
Now that I have cooled to you
Let there be gold of tarnished masonry. Temples soothed by the sun to ruin That sleep utterly.
Give me hand for the dances,
Ripples at Philse, in and out.
And lips, my Lesbian,
Wall flowers that once were flame.
Your hair is my Carthage And my arms the bow.
And our words the arrows To shoot the stars.
Who from that misty sea Swarm to destroy us.
But you there beside me^
Oh ! how shall I defy you.
Who wound me in the night
With breasts shining like Venus and like Mars ? The night that is shouting Jason
When the loud eaves rattle As with waves above me. Blue at the prow of my desire.
O prayers in the dark! O incense to Poseidon! Calm in Atlantis.
----
? IN THE VORTEX
343
^xora this he has, as some would say, "turned" to a sort of maximum objective reality in
The Old Men
Old men who have studied every leg show
in the city
Old men cut from touch by the perfumed music polished or fleeced skulls that stand before
the whole theatre
in silent attitudes
of attention,
old men who have taken precedence over young men
and even over dark-faced husbands whose minds
are a street with' arc-lights. Solitary old men
for whom we find no excuses .
. .
This is less savage than "Les Assis. " His "Portrait of a Woman in Bed" incites me to a comparison with Rimbaud's picture of an old actress in her "loge. " Not to Rimbaud's disadvantage. I don't know that any, save the wholly initiated into the cult of anti-exoticism, would take Williams' poem for an exotic, but there is
no accounting for what may occur in such cases. Portrait of a Woman in Bed
There's my things drying in the corner;
-- --! --! --! -- !
? 244
INSTIGATIONS
that blue skirt
joined to the gray shirt
I'm sick of trouble! Lift the covers
if you want me
and you'll see
the rest of my clothes though it would be cold lying with nothing on
I won't work
and I've got no cash. What are you going to do about it?