CHAPTER X
CONCLUSION
So far our sympathy with modernist poetry has been contemporary sympathy. We have been writing as it were from the middle of the modernist movement in order to justify it if possible against criticism which was not proper to it, which belonged to the preceding stage in poetry-making and which should have passed as the stage passed. It is now possible to reach a position where the modernist movement itself can be looked at with historical (as opposed to contemporary) sympathy as a stage in poetry that is to pass in turn, or may have already passed, leaving behind only such work as did not belong too much to history. The apparent contradictions that will occur in this chapter and seem to gainsay the emphatic sympathy of former chapters will be found to be caused by this superseding of contemporary sympathy by historical sympathy. As nothing can remain contemporary for very long, we were obliged to assume this position if our criticism was to stand before rather than behind its subject.
In discussing the difficulties which exist between contemporary poetry and the contemporary reader, it is necessary to discuss also the difficulties which the contemporary poet has had to face if he has wished to write as a contemporary--to be included in the generation to which by birth and personal sympathy he historically belongs. As the poet, if a true poet, is one by nature and not by effort, he must be seen writing as unconsciously as regards time as his ordinary reader lives. For one remembers the date only by compulsion; no one really feels older to-day than he felt yesterday. The relation of a poet’s poetry to Poetry as a whole and to the time in which it is written is the problem of criticism; and if this problem becomes part of the making of a poem, it adds to the unconscious consciousness of the poet when he is in the act of composition an alien element, a _conscious_ consciousness which we may call the ‘historical effort’. In reading poetry in which this alien element appears one must indeed make the same historical effort if the full intention of the poem is to be appreciated. Therefore the plain reader is likely to prefer to modernist poetry of a past period, in which the historical effort, wherever it has been present, has been absorbed or neutralized by the automatic passing of the period into history.
The greatest difficulty is obviously to define ‘poetry as a whole’ from the point of view of a _temporary_ personal consciousness--that of the poet or reader--attempting to connect itself with a long-term impersonal consciousness, an evolving professional sense. Yet it is easier to do this now than formerly, since poetry, which was once an all-embracing human activity, has been narrowed down by the specialization of other general activities, such as religion and the arts and sciences, into a technical branch of culture of the most limited kind. It has been changed from a ‘humanity’ into an ‘art’; it has attempted to discipline itself with a professionalized criticism which was not needed in the time of the balladists or in primitive societies where poetry went hand in hand with magical religion. Modern civilization seems to demand that the poet should justify himself not only by writing poems but furthermore by proving with each poem the contemporary legitimacy of poetry itself--the professional authority of the term ‘poet’ in fact. And though in a few rare cases the poet may succeed even now in writing by nature without historical or professional effort, he is in general too conscious of the forced professionalization of poetry to be able to avoid justifying himself and his work professionally, that is, critically, as a point of honour. Yet if he does admit poetry to be only one of the specialized, professionalized activities of his period, like music, painting, radiology, aerostatics, the cinema, modern tennis or morbid psychology, he must see it as a very small patch on the time-chart, a mere dot; because society allows less and less space for poetry in its organisation. The only way that this dot on the time-chart can provide itself with artificial dignity and space is through historical depth; if its significance in a particular period is no greater than the size of a dot on the period’s time-chart, then to make itself an authoritative expression of this period it must extend this dot into the past, it must make a historical straight line of it. Poetry becomes the tradition of poetry.
The tradition of poetry, or rather of the art of poetry, then, is the formal organization which the modernist poet finds himself serving as an affiliated member. He must not only have a personal capacity for poetry; that is merely an apprentice certificate. He must also have a master’s sense of the historical experience of poetry--of its past functions and usefulness, its present fitness and possibilities. He must have a science of the ‘values’ of poetry, a scale of bad and good, false and true, ephemeral and lasting; a theory of the tradition of poetry in which successive period-poetries are historically judged either favourably or unfavourably and in which his own period-poetry is carefully adjusted to satisfy the values which the tradition is believed to be continuously evolving. As this tradition is seen as a logical historical development, these values, in their most recent statement, are considered, if observed, sufficient to produce the proper poetic expression of the age. So the poet has no longer to make adjustment to his social environment, as the hero-celebrating bard of the _Beowulf_ time or the religious poet of ancient Egypt had, but critical adjustments to a special tradition of poetic values; and to his own period only an indirect adjustment through the past, the past seen as the poetry of the past narrowing down to the poetry of the present.
The modernist poet therefore has an exaggerated preoccupation with criticism. He has a professional conscience forced on him by the encroachments and pressure of new period activities; and this is understandable. When the prestige of any organization is curtailed--the army or navy for example--a greater internal discipline, morality and study of tactics results, a greater sophistication and up-to-date-ness. In poetry this discipline means the avoidance of all the wrongly-conceived habits and tactics of the past: poetry becomes so sophisticated that it seems to know at last how it should be written and written at the very moment. The more definitely activities like religion, science, psychology and philosophy, which once existed in poetry as loose sentiment, are specialized and confined to their proper departmental technique, the more pure and sharp the technique of poetry itself seems bound to become. It ceases to be civilized in the sense of becoming more and more cultured with loose sentiment; everything in it is particular and strict. It is, indeed, as if poetry were beginning as at the beginning; using all its civilized sophistications to inaugurate a carefully calculated, censored primitiveness.
This new primitive stage, however, has been implied rather than reached in contemporary poetry. There is an increased strictness and experimenting in the construction of the poem, and an increased consciousness of what a poem should not be. But, so far, critical self-consciousness has been only a negative element in the making of poetry. It might seem that the atmosphere it has created would at least make it easier for those who are poets by nature to write well, by removing the temptation to write badly. But on the contrary it hampers them with the consideration of all the poets who have ever written or may be writing or may ever write--not only in the English language but in all languages of the world under every possible social organization. It invents a communal poetic mind which sits over the individual poet whenever he writes; it binds him with the necessity of writing correctly in extension of the tradition, the world-tradition of poetry; and so makes poetry internally an even narrower period activity than it is forced to be by outside influences. In consequence the modernist generation is already over before its time, having counted itself out and swallowed itself up by its very efficiency--a true ‘lost generation’. Already, its most ‘correct’ writers, such as T. S. Eliot, have become classics over the heads of the plain reader, having solved the problem of taste, or period-fashion, so strictly and accurately by themselves and having been so critically severe with themselves beforehand, that their ‘acceptance’ by contemporary or future plain readers has been made superfluous. Creation and critical judgement being made one act, a work has no future history with readers; it is ended when it is ended.
There has been, we see, a short and very concentrated period of carefully disciplined and self-conscious poetry. It has been followed by a pause in which no poetry of any certainty is appearing at all, an embarrassed pause after an arduous and erudite stock-taking. The next stage is not clear. But it is not impossible that there will be a resumption of less eccentric, less strained, more critically unconscious poetry, purified however by this experience of historical effort. In the period just passing no new era was begun. A climax was merely reached in criticism by a combination of sophistication and a desire for a new enlightened primitiveness. Wherever attempts at sheer newness in poetry were made they merely ended in dead movements. Yet the new feeling in criticism did achieve something. It is true in the more extreme cases that by turning into a critical philosophization of itself, poetry ceased to be poetry: it became poetically introspective philosophy. But this was perhaps necessary before poetry could be normal without being vulgar, and deal naturally with truth without being trite.
The abstract nature of poetry in this time became more important than the poetic nature of the poet; the poet tried to write something better than poetry, that is, the poetry of poetry. This laboratory phase, this complex interrelation of metaphysics and psychology blighted the creative processes wherever it was the predominant influence in the actual moments of writing. Compare the highly organized nature of Mr. Eliot’s criticism in its present stage with the gradual disintegration of his poetry since the _Waste Land_. The poem, indeed, gained a certain degree of freedom by the weakening of the personal relationship between it and its creator, but this freedom was, on the other hand, compromised by the forced relation of the poem to the historical period to which it accidentally belonged. The time-element was made the foundation of composition, and any poem which could not be related to its period could not be said to have any immediate critical value, and critical value was the only value by which poetry could become current. The only virtue in this critical tyranny has been to make the world in general more conscious of poetry in a specialized sense and more conversant with its processes and problems.
Briefly, the developments which account for the historical effort which has characterized the period are these. Poetry in the past had found it expedient to accept barbaric philosophical or religious ‘ideas’ and to cast itself within the limits imposed by them. They were barbaric ideas because they were large but definite; infinite, yet fixed by the way that they fixed man; crude and unshaded but incontestable--such as the barbaric idea of God as compared with the civilized idea of God (who is contestable if only in small points, while in barbaric God there are no small points). A barbaric view or order depends on the underlying conception of a crude, undifferentiated, infinite, all-contemporaneous time, and of a humanity co-existent with this time, a humanity consolidated as a mass and not composed of individuals. But when the idea of humanity as a consolidated mass was discredited by the Renaissance, the idea of gross contemporaneousness--of barbaric time--also fell to pieces. Gross time was superseded by relative time--the sense of many times going on at once; as we talk of the suburbs being five years behind the town, of the country being ten years behind the suburbs, of the colonies being ten years behind the country, of the primitive community in Africa being a thousand years behind the colonies; of an inventor being fifty years ahead of commercial recognition. Living, in fact, in different communities of time, or more than this, in different personalities of time, means the same degree of freedom that living in barbaric time does. The poet in the first case need make no historical effort because he has such perfect control over time; he need make none in the second case because time has such perfect control over him. Intense differentiation of time is romanticism, strict uniformity and stabilization of time is classicism. And it would be thought, considering that these distinctions, however contradictory in appearance, did not affect the poetry-making faculties in the poet himself, but only the look of poetry as a whole, that criticism could go on using them without prejudice; as verbal conveniences, for example, for describing the general character of all poetry-making during a particular period--chaotic and individualistic, or orderly and severely conventionalized, as the case might be.
But when poetry began to lose caste among other cultural activities by its diversification of professional method and manners, modernist criticism found it convenient to attack this apparent lack of professional coherence as romantic, to insist on the traditional character of Poetry as an _art_, to reintroduce barbaric (or ‘classical’) time by emphasizing the element of contemporaneousness in composition. When all other activities, particularly those classified as scientific, were developing carefully relative time-senses, poetry now attempted to stabilize itself by reverting to an absolute time-sense. A relative time-sense in poetry was critically condemned as vulgar, unprofessional, extravagant, because much that was vulgar, falsely poetic and personally extravagant could in fact smuggle itself into poetry under the guise of relativity. It seemed to criticism hopeless and silly to attempt to repair the dignity of poetry by demanding greater personal integrity in the poet. The only practicable remedy seemed to be the declaration of an absolute which should bring about immediate--if artificial--order and uniformity. For this, however, an intellectual time-effort was necessary in workmanship which stultified or deformed this workmanship. The absoluteness or barbarism of the modern poet was an unhappy strained product of sophistications.
It is one thing to observe historically that at such and such a period an idea of humanity, time and art, each consolidated as a mass, prevailed, and that a peculiarly fixed kind of perfection, as in Egyptian art, appeared in this period. But it is another thing to try to give such an idea of consolidation artificially to poetry: that it is creating not poetry but historical criticism. Such an attempt to submerge all separate poetic faculties in a single professional communism would by its simplicity be naturally pleasing to criticism; but the more simple in theory, the more complicated in practice. In a natural classical period the elaborate complexity of the personal poetic faculty--at any time nearly insoluble--becomes soluble because the demands made on it for conformity are superficial, formal, ritualistic. The poetic faculty does not only have to betray its complexity in an artificially classical period. The poetic faculty itself is called upon to invent the rituals by which it is to become formalized; to do the impossible, in other words--to invent simplicity with complexity. Which explains why there is more eccentric variety in this modernist classicism than ever appeared in romanticism. The early nineteenth-century poets wrote so similarly principally because, in spite of their individualistic propensities and their private purposes or passions, they were historically one in reacting against the same sort of classicism, and were never, moreover, able to get beyond serving this reaction; modernism, in the early nineteenth century, meant reaction. Modernism in the early twentieth century has also meant reaction, a reaction against reaction, setting itself the impossible task of individually but not individualistically creating a new classicism--a classicism founded on a philosophical theory which each poet was bound to interpret differently because he was not, so to speak, classically born.
The habit of philosophy is to observe and from observations to order conduct; to generalize from particulars and to simplify its generalities, in search of a code of perfection: and thus to minimize the reality of variation, digression, error in order to arrive at a single barbaric whole. Pure philosophy is thus always classical in spirit. When the relativist idea of personality began to break down classical social formality, pure philosophy grew more and more feeble. Philosophy could either devote itself to attacking caprice (it could fight the battle of classicism against romanticism), or it could become romantic--that is, it could allow itself to decay. This in the main is what it did, any other alternatives being generally too obscure, unhistorical and eccentric to be attractive. The chance, however, eventually came to philosophy of reviving its old authority as the science of sciences against the encroachment of modern differentiation and specialization, in a prospective alliance with poetry, which originally had first-class and general significance as the undifferentiated art of arts in a barbaric order. Poetry itself, dissatisfied with the position to which it had been reduced by the romantic nineteenth century--a position in which it seemed to be allowed to exist only by the humour and grace of science--was, of course, favourably inclined to such an alliance. And so began the new classicism.
This alliance, in the beginning only a sentimental one, needed to be legalized by some tame philosopher, some Aristotle of modernism who would make the new barbarism respectable and provide it with a coherent argument and a vocabulary. Such a person was found in T. E. Hulme, who was killed in 1917 before he had developed a well-defined system of aesthetics; who had, however, left enough fragments to be accepted as gospel by a generation starved for suitable philosophico-literary dogma. Hulme was, naturally, a man disappointed with philosophy since the Renaissance. It was no longer ‘pure’; and, searching for a way to purify it, he stumbled on the need which art--painting or sculpture or poetry--had to be philosophically organized and corrected. His concept of the absolute (the search for the absolute is the chief concern, as we have seen, of ‘pure’ philosophy) derided any idea of relativity: it emphasized the general principle of poetic co-ordination; but the general principle rather than the form in which co-ordination should take place. It is significant that the few poems Hulme wrote himself fall under the period classification popular in his time, Imagism. In his desire to co-ordinate and correctly generalize, Hulme fell into the familiar philosophical confusion--the confusion of analogy. Art, for instance, is a philosophical term invented for the convenience of classification, not a term that poetry would naturally invent for itself, though painting and sculpture, on the other hand, might. To the philosopher, however, the most accurate term is the most general rather than the most particular, and so to Hulme a common co-ordination of the ‘arts’ of painting, sculpture and poetry seemed possible and necessary. The fundamental fallacy in such an attempted co-ordination appears with the difficulty which poetry has to face in entering a new artificially barbaric era. In painting and sculpture neither colour nor stone had been intrinsically affected by the romantic works in which they had been used. To escape the Renaissance, painting and sculpture merely had to revert to barbaric modes--negroid, Oceanic, Aztec, Egyptian, Chinese, archaic Greek--creating modern forms as if in primitive times; forms primitive, obedient to the conventions which they accepted, therefore final, absolute, ‘abstract’. But poetry could not seemingly submit itself to an _as if_, because its expressive medium, language, had been intrinsically affected not only by the works in which it had been used but also by all the non-poetic uses of which language is capable. This difference between poetry and more regular arts points to a variance in poetry and suggests the probable falsity of all philosophical generalizations on art. The falsity is the falsity of analogy; yet analogy is the strongest philosophical instrument of co-ordination. Since poetry as an art is not sufficiently regular, not sufficiently professional, it is to become so by being made more sculptural or pictorial, by having grafted on it the values and methods of more professional arts.
Language, therefore, had to be reorganized, used as if afresh, cleansed of its experience: to be as ‘pure’ and ‘abstract’ as colour or stone. Words had to be reduced to their least historical value; the purer they could be made, the more eternally immediate and present they would be; they could express the absolute at the same time as they expressed the age. Or this was at any rate the logical effect of scientific barbarism if taken literally.
Gertrude Stein is perhaps the only artisan of language who has ever succeeded in practising scientific barbarism literally. Her words are primitive in the sense that they are bare, immobile, mathematically placed, abstract: so primitive indeed that the theorists of the new barbarism have repudiated her work as a romantic vulgar barbarism, expressing the personal crudeness of a mechanical age rather than a refined historical effort to restore a lost absolute to a community of co-ordinated poets. Mr. Eliot has said of her work that “it is not improving, it is not amusing, it is not interesting, it is not good for one’s mind. But its rhythms have a peculiar hypnotic power not met with before. It has a kinship with the saxophone. If this is the future then the future is, as it very likely is, of the barbarians. But this is the future in which we ought not to be interested.” Mr. Eliot was for the moment speaking for civilization. He was obliged to do this because it seemed suddenly impossible to reconcile the philosophy of the new barbarism with the historical state of the poetic mind and with the professional dignity of poetry which the new barbarism was invented to restore: a sincere attempt to do so was at once crude and obscure like the work of Miss Stein. Except for such whole-hog literalness as hers, professional modernist poetry has lacked the co-ordination which professional modernist criticism implies: and this contradiction between criticism and workmanship makes it incoherent. It has been too busy being civilized, varied, intellectual--too socially and poetically energetic--to take advantage of the privileged consistency of the new barbarism.
Criticism has been so busy talking about criticism (criticism has been so philosophical, that is) that it has had little either relevant or helpful to say about poetry itself--not poetry as a philosophical abstraction but as _poems_ and as the poets, who are potential poems. Though objecting to the romantic disorganization in which there are ‘beauties’ instead of beauty, it has nevertheless had no absolute canon of beauty to offer to the classical poetry it has wished to inspire, but only an undifferentiated satire of beauties and a counsel to suppress the obvious because the obvious is often romantically, personally and therefore sentimentally beautiful. It has insisted that a fixed dogmatic abstract beauty is the only possible system for poetic perfection and yet has had nothing better to offer than a few elementary suggestions and clues such as that ‘golden lad’ is a beautiful classical phrase and ‘golden youth’ a beautiful romantic phrase (Hulme). “The thing has got so bad now”, wrote Hulme, “that a poem which is all dry and hard, a properly Classical poem, would not be considered poetry at all. They cannot see that accurate description is a legitimate object of verse.”
Hulme was asking a forward-looking twentieth-century generation to arm itself against romanticism, an early nineteenth-century bogey, or against the Renaissance bogey itself. He wanted to oppose a sophisticated levity to the idiot-headed seriousness of romanticism, a classical fancy to a romantic imagination; but in practice the opposition was of a heavy, rigid, originally dull seriousness to a rather ingenuous sometimes successful often droll though perhaps eventually dull seriousness. “Wonder must cease to be wonder”, Hulme complained: but in the beginning while there is wonder there is always the chance of a surprise success in romanticism. In classicism, which sets out with a very limited, certain intention, there is never the chance of success in this sense. If romantic freakishness generally quiets down to triteness and is for this reason dull, classical freakishness is fixed and eternal from the outset; and thus eternally dull.
The most serious flaw in poetic modernism has been its attachment to originality. The modernist poet has not been able to forsake originality however directly it might contradict the classical idea of discipline; and the effect of discipline has therefore only been to make originality more original. As originality increased and as modernist poetry consequently became more and more romantic, the contradiction between it and modernist criticism was intensified. Criticism became more dogmatic and unreal, poetry more eccentric and chaotic. Classicism and originality could only be reconciled in the invention of an original type, were this possible, of a form entirely new, peculiar, particular, uncommon, and yet universal, general, common; when once invented, as old as the hills. But obviously the invention of an original type in personal embodiments can get no further than an earnest caricature of the ordinary, as in Joyce’s Leopold Blum, or T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock and other low types; no further certainly in mechanical embodiments. Originality becomes an attack on a degenerated ordinary.
The problem was further complicated by the insistence (as in Hulme) on the ‘direct communication’ by which originality was to make itself effective; direct communication referring to an immediate ideal intelligibility. But since language had been tainted by false experiences, much of the energy of this originality had to be devoted to an attack on the ordinary language of communication; and direct communication, like the original type, could get no further than an earnest caricature of ordinary language. This is from Mr. Eliot’s most recent stage:
DUSTY: Do you know London well, Mr. Krumpacker?
KLIPSTEIN: No, we have never been here before.
KRUMPACKER: We hit this town last night for the first time.
KLIPSTEIN: And I certainly hope it won’t be the last time.
DORIS: You like London, Mr. Klipstein?
KRUMPACKER: Do we like London? Do we like London! Do we like London!! Eh, what Klip?
KLIPSTEIN: Say, Miss--er--uh! London’s swell. We like London fine.
KRUMPACKER: Perfectly slick.
DUSTY: Why don’t you come and live here then?
But caricature is romantic. Miss Edith Sitwell’s poetry is perhaps the clearest instance of the romantic caricature of language that critical classicism is obliged to take under its wing.
Another aspect of the same general flaw is the incompatibility of the ‘things’ which were supposed to be revealed in the direct communication (‘things’ in which apparently the first principle inheres) with the talent of the artist to see things ‘as no one else sees them’. The barbaric absolute, the divine source of things, wherever it has prevailed naturally, has always been marked by a penetrating obviousness. The pyramids are penetratingly obvious, so much so that they nearly make the absolute synonymous with obviousness.
But a belief in the fundamental obviousness or absoluteness of ‘things’ is inconsistent with a belief in an eccentricity in things which the artist is supposed to reveal: and a belief in the fundamental obviousness or ordinariness of a mass humanity, adhering personally to the same absolute to which ‘things’ adhere, is inconsistent with a belief in the creative originality which is to reveal the eccentricity latent in obviousness to this mass humanity equipped only to seize the obvious. The only possible way for creative originality to be consistent with mass humanity is by some mystical process in which the artist is chosen as the inspired instrument of mass-ordinariness to reveal ‘things’ which he sees as no one else sees because everything is so obvious and everyone so ordinary that one does not ordinarily ‘see’ the obviousness and ordinariness unless one is possessed of creative originality.
While such a philosophical tangle was forcing modernist poets into an unwitting romanticism, Gertrude Stein went on--and kept going on for twenty years--quietly, patiently and successfully practising an authentic barbarism; quite by herself and without encouragement. Her only fault, from the practical point of view, was that she took primitiveness too literally, so literally that she made herself incomprehensible to the exponents of primitivism--to everyone for that matter. She exercised perfect discipline over her creative faculties and she was able to do this because she was completely without originality. Everybody being unable to understand her thought that this was because she was too original or was trying hard to be original. But she was only divinely inspired in ordinariness: her creative originality, that is, was original only because it was so grossly, so humanly, all-inclusively ordinary. She used language automatically to record pure ultimate obviousness. She made it capable of direct communication not by caricaturing contemporary language--attacking decadence with decadence--but by purging it completely of its false experiences. None of the words Miss Stein uses ever had experience. They are no older than the use she makes of them, and she has been herself no older than her age conceived barbarically.
Put it there in there where they have it Put it there in there there and they halve it Put it there in there there and they have it Put it there in there there and they halve it
These words have had no history, and the design that Miss Stein has made of them is literally ‘abstract’ and mathematical because they are commonplace words without any hidden etymology; they are mechanical and not eccentric. If they possess originality it is that of mass-automatism.
Miss Stein in her _Composition as Explanation_ has written:
Nothing changes from generation to generation except the thing seen, and that makes a composition.
Her admission that there are generations does not contradict her belief in an unvarying first principle. Time does not vary, only the sense of time.
Automatically with the acceptance of the time-sense comes the recognition of the beauty, and once the beauty is accepted the beauty never fails anyone.
Beauty has no history, according to Miss Stein, nor has time: only the time-sense has history. When the time-sense acclaims a beauty that was not at first recognized, the finality of this beauty is at once established; it is as though it had never been denied. All beauty is equally final. The reason why the time-sense if realized reveals the finality or classicalness of beauty, is that it is the feeling of beginning, of primitiveness and freshness which is each age’s or each generation’s version of time.
Beginning again and again and again explaining composition and time is a natural thing. It is understood by this time that everything is the same except composition and time, composition and the time of the composition and the time in the composition.
Originality of vision, then, is invented, she holds, not by the artist but by the collective time-sense. The artist does not see things ‘as no one else sees them’. He sees those objective ‘things’ by which the age repeatedly verifies and represents the absolute. He sees concretely and expressibly what everyone else possessed of the time-sense has an unexpressed intuition of: the time-sense may not be generally and particularly universal; but this does not mean that the artist’s vision, even his originality of vision, is less collective or less universal.
The composition is the thing seen by everyone living in the living they are doing, they are the composing of the composition that at the time they are living is the composition of the time in which they are living. It is that that makes living a thing they are doing. Nothing else is different, of that almost anyone can be certain. The time when and the time of and the time in that composition is the natural phenomena of that composition and of that perhaps everyone can be certain.
All this Gertrude Stein has understood and executed logically because of the perfect simplicity of her mind. Believing implicitly in an absolute, she has not been bothered to doubt the bodily presence of a first principle in her own time. Since she is alive and everybody around her seems to be alive, of course there is an acting first principle, there is composition. This first principle provides a theme for composition because there is time, and everybody, and the beginning again and again and again, and composition. In her primitive good-humour she has not found it necessary to trouble about defining the theme. The theme is to be inferred from the composition. The composition is clear because the language means nothing but what it means through her using of it. The composition is final because it is ‘a more and more continuous present including more and more using of everything and continuing more and more beginning and beginning and beginning’. She creates this atmosphere of continuousness principally by her progressive use of the tenses of verbs, by intense and unflagging repetitiousness and an artificially assumed and regulated child-mentality: the child’s time-sense is so vivid that an occurrence is always consecutive to itself, it goes on and on, it has been going on and on, it will be going on and on (a child does perhaps feel the passage of time, does to a certain extent feel itself older than it was yesterday because yesterday was already to-morrow even while it was yesterday).
This is from Miss Stein’s _Saints in Season_:
Saint-- A Saint Saint and very well I thank you. Two in bed. Two in bed. Yes two in bed. They had eaten. Two in bed. They had eaten. Two in bed. She says weaken. If she said. She said two in bed. She said they had eaten. She said yes two in bed. She said weaken.
Do not acknowledge to me that seven are said that a Saint and seven that it is said that a saint in seven that there is said to be a saint in seven.
Now as to illuminations.
They are going to illuminate and everyone is to put into their windows their most beautiful object and everyone will say and the streets will be crowded everyone will say look at it.
They do say look at it.
To look at it. They will look at it. They will say look at it.
Repetition has the effect of breaking down the possible historical senses still inherent in the words. So has the infantile jingle of rhyme and assonance. So has the tense-changing of verbs, because restoring to them their significance as a verbal mathematics of motion. Miss Stein’s persistence in her own continuousness is astonishing: this is how she wrote in 1926, and in 1906. She has achieved a continuous present by always beginning again, for this keeps everything different and everything the same. It creates duration but makes it absolute by preventing anything from happening in the duration.
And after that what changes what changes after that, after that what changes and what changes after that and after that and what changes and after that and what changes after that.
The composition has a theme because it has no theme. The words are a self-pursuing, tail-swallowing series and are thus thoroughly abstract. They achieve what Hulme called but could not properly envisage--not being acquainted, it seems, with Miss Stein’s work--a ‘perpendicular’, an escape from the human horizontal plane. They contain no reference; no meaning, no caricatures, no jokes, no despairs. They are ideally automatic, creating one another. The only possible explanation of lines like the following is that one word or combination of words creates the next.
Anyhow means furls furls with a chance chance with a change change with as strong strong with as will will with as sign sign with as west west with as most most with as in in with as by by with as change change with as reason reason to be lest lest they did when when they did for for they did there and then. Then does not celebrate the there and then.
This is repetition and continuousness and beginning again and again and again.
Nothing that we have said here should be understood as disrespectful to Gertrude Stein. She has had courage, clarity, sincerity, simplicity. She has created a human mean in language, a mathematical equation of ordinariness which leaves one with a tender respect for that changing and unchanging slowness that is humanity and Gertrude Stein.
Miss Stein’s sterilization of words until they are exhausted of history and meaning must be distinguished from sophisticated abandonment of meaning in the midst of a feverish pursuit of meaning, a blasé renouncement of significance to confusion. The following from a poem by Mr. Sacheverell Sitwell is an instance of such a renouncement:
Y. “... a thundering motor drumming its persistence on the giggling air. Persistence, and I mean the everlasting life.... And in feet the rolling drums should rattle in the square before a thick curtain that no eye can pierce And trumpets should sound out from all the square-set towers.... Persistence, I said--I mean the giggling air, rather I should say I mean the giggling drums or rolling drums: persistence--and I mean the....”
X. “... persistent air?...”
Y. “No, no: Persistence, and I mean the giggling air; I meant to talk about the everlasting life, Until you muddled me and made me stop.”
Miss Stein’s tidy processes must also be distinguished from the deliberate untidying of language to give it more meaning, more history, more dramatic excitement, as in James Joyce’s _Ulysses_:
The Quaker librarian, quaking, tiptoed in, quake, his mask, quake, with haste, quake, quack.
Door closed. Cell. Day.
They list. Three. They.
I you he they.
Come, mess.
This needs only to be accurately read in the rather complicated context, to be tidied into its context, so to speak, to make obvious sense. Even the following poem by E. E. Cummings is neither pure nor abstract, but realistic, wilfully linked to history.
life hurl my yes, crumbles hand (ful released conarefetti) ev eryflitter, inga, where mil (lions of aflickf) litter ing brightmillion ofS hurl; edindodg: ing whom are Eyes shy-dodge is bright cruMbshandful, quick-hurl edinwho Is flittercrumbs, fluttercrimbs are floatfallin,g; allwhere: a: crimflitterinish, is arefloatsis ingfallall! mil, shy, milbrightlions my (hurl flicker handful in) dodging are shybrigHteyes is crum bs(alll)if, ey, Es[2]
It is an attempt to represent, in the manner of the early futurists, the book of life torn into a million fragments as small as confetti, the bread of life crumbled nervously under the disorganizing influence of shy bright eyes, bright like the million stars. A most romantic theme and a most romantic treatment, but Mr. Cummings was never apprenticed to the new barbarism; he is a freebooter.
One way the modernist poet has of keeping romantically alive in this classicism, whether or not he goes as far as Gertrude Stein’s automatism, is by carefully avoiding a theme. When Mr. Allen Tate says, for instance, in his introduction to Hart Crane’s _White Buildings_ that Mr. Crane has not yet found a theme to match his poetic vision, he is really explaining that Mr. Crane is preserving his vision from a theme, that his vision is reacting romantically against contemporary classicism. Hart Crane’s poems reveal many of the qualities peculiar to enforced romantics: it is noticeable that Mr. Tate allies him with other enforced romantics--Poe, Rimbaud, Edith Sitwell, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens--though Mr. Crane has sufficient dignity to be able to dispense with such literary support. Much of the intensity of his poetry--intensity often protracted into strain--is due to the conflict between discipline and originality. The result is a compromise in the mysticism of rhetoric:
Bind us in time, O Seasons clear, and awe. O minstrel galleons of Carib fire, Bequeath us to no earthly shore until Is answered in the vortex of our grave The seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.
This romantic mysticism of rhetoric--romantic because discipline merges with originality rather than originality with discipline--results in a mysticism of geography, not to say of subjects. The movements of his poems are the fluctuations of surfaces: they give a sea-sense of externality: the moon, the sea, frost, tropical horizons, the monotony of continuous exploration. Their direction is classical; that is, they tend to become mechanical by a sort of ecstasy of technical excellence:
O I have known metallic paradises Where cuckoos clucked to finches Above the deft catastrophes of drums. While titters hailed the groans of death Beneath gyrating awnings I have seen The incunabula of the divine grotesque. This music has a reassuring way.
And here he would rest if he did not, in his restraint ‘have extreame’, have what he calls ‘fine collapses’--
We can evade you and all else but the heart: What blame to us if the heart live on?
By such fine collapses, composition just manages to escape with its life--beginning again and again and again in spite of its posthumous classicism.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 2: It has been found impracticable in the printing of this poem to set it vertically on the page, as it was originally printed--to suggest a downward fluttering movement.]
INDEX OF PRINCIPAL PROPER NAMES
Acton, Harold, 201
A. E., 166
Aiken, Conrad, 166
Aldington, Richard, 216, 217
Anglo-Irish mystics, 124
Aristotle, 191, 208
Baedeker, 242
Baudelaire, 39
Beddoes, T. L., 81, 173
Belloc, Hilaire, 17
_Beowulf_, author of, 262
Binyon, L., 220
Blake, William, 195, 196, 198
Blunden, Edmund, 176
Bottomley, Gordon, 220
Brahms, 96
Bridges, Dr. Robert, 92, 93
Brooke, Rupert, 120, 164
Browning, R., 158, 160, 161, 183, 197, 236
Burns, Robert, 173, 195
Bynner, Witter, 166
Byron, Lord, 176, 192, 193, 197-199, 224, 236, 241
Calverley, C. S., 37
Campbell, T., 197
Canaletto, 239
Catullus, 252-254
Chalmers, A., 78
Chaucer, G., 173
Chesterton, G. K., 17
Clare, John, 195
Coleridge, S. T., 95, 99, 105, 158, 192-193
Colman, G., 244
Crane, Hart, 47, 289-291
Cummings, E. E., 9-34, 38-41, 44, 59-64, 84-88, 100, 131-134, 153, 174, 187, 201-202, 217, 245-247, 249-250, 252, 288-289
Cunard, Nancy, 165, 201
Darley, G., 173
David, King, 48
Davidson, Donald, 209, 211, 214
Davidson, John, 184
Davies, W. H., 200-201
Debussy, 96
de Gourmont, Rémy, 14
de Saint Pierre, B., 235
de Vere, Aubrey, 197
Dickinson, Emily, 122, 183
Dobson, Austin, 116
Doolittle, Hilda (“H.D.”), 121-123, 204, 217
Doughty, C. M., 199
Drinkwater, J., 100, 111-112
Dryden, J., 173
Duck, Stephen, 194
Ecclesiastes, 222, 225
Eliot, T. S., 50-53, 165, 167-174, 201-202, 211-215, 217, 223, 235-242, 252, 264, 265, 275, 278, 289
Euripides, 176
Fletcher, John, 168, 170
Flint, F. S., 217
France, Anatole, 225
Frazer, Sir James, 171-172
Frost, Robert, 176-177
Gautier, 234
Gay, J., 243
Georgians, the, 118-120, 221
Goldsmith, Oliver, 37
Gongora, 218
Gosse, Sir Edmund, 116
Graves, Richard, 196
Gray, Thomas, 30
Greene, R., 44
Guedalla, Philip, 206
Haldane, J. B. S., 167
Hardy, Thomas, 198, 225
Hemans, Felicia, 99
Hemingway, Ernest, 223
Homer, 252
Hood, Thomas, 37
Hopkins, G. M., 90-94
Housman, A. E., 198
Hulme, T. E., 272-278, 286
Imagists, the, 116-124, 131, 135, 204, 272
Japanese poets, the, 28, 217
Jonson, Ben, 241
Joyce, James, 107, 203, 204, 256, 278, 288
Keats, John, 95, 99, 158, 160, 170, 171, 192-195, 208
Kydd, T., 45, 173
La Rousse, 242
Lawrence, D. H., 167
Lefanu, Joseph Sheridan, 244
Le Gallienne, Richard, 186
Leigh Hunt, J. H., 195
Lindsay, Vachel, 180
Lodge, 44
Longfellow, H. W., 105
Lyly, J., 44, 173
Mallarmé, 28
Malone, E., 78
Marlowe, Christopher, 44, 45, 80
Marvell, Andrew, 173
Masefield, J., 244
Meikle, J., 99
Mendes, Catulle, 234
Milton, John, 17, 31, 55, 56, 173, 204
Montgomery, R., 99
Moore, Marianne, 111-114, 168, 185-186, 249
Moore, Thomas, 99, 197
Morris, J. W., 250
Nashe, T., 44
Nichols, Robert, 184-185
Noyes, Alfred, 167
Ossian, 208
Owen, Wilfred, 121, 164
Peele, G., 44, 173
Philips, Ambrose, 196
Picasso, P., 202, 204
Poe, E. A., 38-39, 57, 191, 197, 289
Pope, Alexander, 159, 196
Pound, Ezra, 140, 141, 172, 180, 187, 204, 216-219
Pre-Raphaelites, the, 197
Prewett, Frank, 176, 205
Ransom, John Crowe, 100, 103-109, 209, 211, 214, 229-230, 252
Read, Herbert, 167
Rimbaud, 28, 32, 289
Rogers, Samuel, 99, 159
Rosenberg, Isaac, 121, 220-222
Rousseau, J. J., 252
Ruskin, John, 236
Sandburg, Carl, 100-102
Sassoon, Siegfried, 176-177
Shakespeare, W., 9, 10, 44-46, 62-82, 108, 151, 173, 190, 237-243, 252
Shelley, P. B., 95, 99, 158, 192-193, 195, 198
Shenstone, W., 99, 196
Sitwell, Edith, 167, 175, 201, 203, 204, 217, 223, 231-235, 247-249, 279, 289
Sitwell, Osbert, 210-213
Sitwell, Sacheverell, 167-171, 185, 232, 234, 287
Sorley, Charles, 121
Spenser, Edmund, 173, 208
Steevens, George, 77-78
Stein, Gertrude, 204, 223, 274-275, 280-289
Stevens, W., 166, 216, 217, 289
Surrey, Earl of, 45
Swift, Jonathan, 173
Swinburne, A. C., 197, 208
Symons, Arthur, 116
Tagore, Rabindranath, 17
Tate, Allen, 213-215, 252-254, 289
Tennyson, Lord, 31, 37, 49-55, 158, 160-163, 167, 182, 197, 208
Thompson, Francis, 158, 159, 208
Traherne, 198
Tupper, Martin, 99, 193, 197
Turner, W. J., 167
Untermeyer, Louis, 11, 26
Valéry, Paul, 29, 30, 35-38, 42-43
Vers Librists, the, 119, 145
Virgil, 50
Wagner, 96
Webster, J., 173, 212
Whitman, Walt, 99, 197, 208
Wilde, O., 197, 199, 208
Williams, Dr. W. C., 201-204, 216-217
Wolfe, Humbert, 222
Wordsworth, William, 95, 96, 99, 158, 159, 173, 181, 186, 192-195, 197, 215
Wyatt, Sir T., 45
Yeats, W. B., 178
THE END.
=TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES=
Simple typographical errors have been silently corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced.
Punctuation and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.
Inconsistent hyphens left as printed.