V.
Barbarian ethics proceed by general taboos. Gourmont's essays collected into various volumes, "Promenades," "Epilogues," etc., are perhaps the best introduction to the ideas of our time that any unfortunate, suddenly emerging from Peru, Peoria, Oshkosh, Iceland, Kochin, or other out-of-the-way lost continent could desire. A set of Landor's collected works will go further towards civilizing a man than any university education now on the market. Montaigne condensed Renaissance awareness. Even so small a collection as Lionel Johnson's "Post Liminium" might save a man from utter barbarity.
But if, for example, a raw graduate were contemplating a burst into intellectual company, he would be less likely to utter unutterable _bêtisses, gaffes_, etc., after reading Gourmont than before. One cannot of course create intelligence in a numbskull.
Needless to say, Gourmont's essays are of uneven value as the necessary subject matter is of uneven value. Taken together, proportionately placed in his work, they are a portrait of the civilized mind. I incline to think them the best portrait available, the best record that is, of the civilized mind from 1885-1915.
There are plenty of people who do not know what the civilized mind is like, just as there were plenty of mules in England who did not read Landor contemporaneously, or who did not in his day read Montaigne. Civilization is individual.
Gourmont arouses the senses of the imagination, preparing the mind for receptivities. His wisdom, if not of the senses, is at any rate via the senses. We base our "science" on perceptions, but our ethics have not yet attained this palpable basis.
In 1898, "PAYS LOINTAIN" (reprinted from magazine publication of 1892-4), de Gourmont was beginning his method:
"Douze crimes pour l'honneur de l'infini."
He treats the special case, cases as special as any of James', but segregated on different demarcative lines. His style had attained the vividness of
"Sa vocation était de paraître malheureuse, de passer dans la vie comme une ombre gémissante, d'inspirer de la pitié, du doute et de l'inquiétude. Elle avait toujours l'air de porter des fleurs vers une tombe abandonnée."
_La Femme en Noir._
In "HISTOIRES MAGIQUES" (1894): "La Robe Blanche," "Yeux d'eau," "Marguerite Rouge," "Sœur de Sylvie," "Danaette," are all of them special cases, already showing his perception of nevrosis, of hyperæsthesia. His mind is still running on tonal variations in "Les Litanies de la Rose."
"Pourtant il y a des yeux au bout des doigts." "Femmes, conservatrices des traditions milésiennes."
"EPILOGUES" (1895-98). Pleasant re-reading, a book to leave lying about, to look back into at odd half hours. A book of accumulations. Full of meat as a good walnut.
Heterogeneous as the following paragraphs:
"Ni la croyance en un seul Dieu, ni la morale ne sont les fondements vrais de la religion. Une religion, même le Christianisme, n'eut jamais sur les mœurs qu'une influence dilatoire, l'influence d'un bras levé; elle doit recommencer son prêche, non pas seulement avec chaque génération humaine, mais avec chaque phase d'une vie individuelle. N'apportant pas des vérités évidentes en soi, son enseignement oublié, elle ne laisse rien dans les âmes que l'effroi du peut-être et la honte d'être asservi à une peur ou à une espérance dont les chaînes fantômales entravent non pas nos actes mais nos désirs. * * * * * * * "L'essence d'une religion, c'est sa littérature. Or la littérature religieuse est morte." _Religions._
"Je veux bien que l'on me protège contre des ennemis inconnus, l'escarpe ou le cambrioleur,--mais contre moi-même, vices ou passions, non." _Madame Boulton._
"Si le cosmopolitisme littéraire gagnait encore et qu'il réussît à éteindre ce que les différences de race ont allumé de haine de sang parmi les hommes, j'y verrais un gain pour la civilisation et pour l'humanité tout entière." _Cosmopolitisme._
"Augier! Tous les lucratifs rêves de la bourgeoise économe; tous les soupirs des vierges confortables; toutes les réticences des consciences soignées; toutes les joies permises aux ventres prudents; toutes les veuleries des bourses craintives; tous les siphons conjugaux; toutes les envies de la robe montante contre les épaules nues; toutes les haines du waterproof contre la grâce et contre la beauté! Augier, crinoline, parapluie, bec-de-corbin, bonnet grec...." _Augier._
"Dieu aime la mélodie grégorienne, mais avec modération. Il a soin de varier le programme quotidien des concerts célestes, dont le fond reste le plain-chant lithurgique, par des auditions de Bach, Mozart, Haendel, Haydn, 'et même Gounod.' Dieu ignore Wagner, mais il aime la variété." _Le Dieu des Belges._
"La propriété n'est pas sacrée; elle n'est qu'un fait acceptable comme nécessaire au développement de la liberté individuelle.... * * * * * * * "L'abominable loi des cinquantes ans--contre laquelle Proudhon lutta en vain si courageusement--commence à faire sentir sa tyrannie. La veuve de M. Dumas a fait interdire la reprise d'Antony. Motif: son bon plaisir. Des caprices d'héritiers peuvent d'un jour à l'autre nous priver pendant cinquante ans de toute une œuvre. * * * * * * * "Demain les œuvres de Renan, de Taine, de Verlaine, de Villiers peuvent appartenir à un curé fanatique ou à une dévote stupide." _La Propriété Littéraire._
"M. Desjardins, plus modeste, inaugure la morale artistique et murale, secondé par l'excellent M. Puvis de Chavannes qui n'y comprend rien, mais s'avoue tout de même bien content de figurer sur les murs." _U.P.A.M._
"Les auteurs, 'avertis par le Public....' Il y a dans ces mots toute une esthétique, non seulement dramatique, mais démocratique: Plus d'insuccès. Plus de fours. Admirable invention par laquelle, sans doute, le peuple trouvera enfin l'art qui lui convient et les auteurs qu'il mérite." _Conscience Littéraire._
"Le citoyen est une variété de l'homme; variété dégénérée ou primitive il est à l'homme ce que le chat de goutière est au chat sauvage. * * * * * * * "Comme toutes les créations vraiment belles et noblement utiles, la sociologie fut l'œuvre d'un homme de génie, M. Herbert Spencer, et le principe de sa gloire. * * * * * * * "La saine Sociologie traite de l'évolution à travers les âges d'un groupe de métaphores, Famille, Patrie, Etat, Société, etc. Ces mots sont de ceux que l'on dit collectifs et qui n'ont en soi aucune signification, l'histoire les a employés dë tous temps, mais la Sociologie, par d'astucieuses définitions précise leur néant tout en propageant leur culte.
"Car tout mot collectif, et d'abord ceux du vocabulaire sociologique sont l'objet d'un culte. A la Famille, à la Patrie, à l'Etat, à la Société, on sacrifie des citoyens mâles et des citoyens femelles; les mâles en plus grand nombre; ce n'est que par intermède, en temps de grève ou d'émeute, pour essayer un nouveau fusil que l'on perfore des femelles; elles offrent au coup une cible moins défiante et plus plaisante; ce sont là d'inévitables petits incidents de la vie politique. Le mâle est l'hostie ordinaire. * * * * * * * "Le caractère fondamental du citoyen est donc le dévouement, la résignation et la stupidité; il exerce principalement ces qualités selon trois fonctions physiologiques, comme animal reproducteur, comme animal électoral, comme animal contribuable. * * * * * * * "Devenu animal électoral, le citoyen n'est pas dépourvu de subtilité. Ayant flairé, il distingue hardiment entre un opportuniste et un radical. Son ingéniosité va jusqu'à la méfiance: le mot Liberté le fait aboyer, tel un chien perdu. A l'idée qu'on va le laisser seul dans les ténèbres de sa volonté, il pleure, il appelle sa mère, la République, son père, l'Etat. * * * * * * * "Du fond de sa grange ou de son atelier, il entretient volontiers ceux qui le protègent contre lui-même. * * * * * * * "Et puis songe: si tu te révoltais, il n'y aurait plus de lois, et quand tu voudrais mourir, comment ferais-tu, si le régistre n'était plus là pour accueillir ton nomme?" _Paradoxes sur le Citoyen._
"Si l'on est porté à souhaiter un déraillement, il faut parler, il faut écrire, il faut sourire, il faut s'abstenir--c'est le grand point de toute vie civique. Les actuelles organisations sociales ont cette tare fondamentale que l'abstention légale et silencieuse les rend inermes et ridicules. Il faut empoisonner l'Autorité, lentement, en jouant. C'est si charmant de jouer et si utile au bon fonctionnement humain! Il faut se moquer. Il faut passer, l'ironie dans les yeux, à travers les mailles des lois anti-libérales, et quand on promène à travers nos vignes, gens de France, l'idole gouvernementale, gardez-vous d'aucun acte vilain, des gros mots, des violences--rentrez chez vous, et mettez les volets. Sans avoir rien fait que de très simple et de très innocent vous vous réveillerez plus libres le lendemain." _Les Faiseurs de Statues._
"Charmant Tzar, tu la verras chez toi, la Révolution, stupide comme le peuple et féroce comme la bourgeoisie; tu la verras, dépassant en animalité et en rapacité sanglante tout ce qu'on t'a permis de lire dans les tomes expurgés qui firent ton éducation." _Le Délire Russe._
"Or un écrivain, un poète, un philosophe, un homme des régions intellectuelles n'a qu'une patrie: sa langue." _Querelles de Belgique._
"Il faut encore, pour en revenir aux assassins, noter que le crime, sauf en des rares cas passionnels, est le moyen et non le but." _Crimes._
"Le vers traditionnel est patriotique et national; le vers nouveau est anarchiste et sans patrie. Il semble que la rime riche fasse partie vraiment de la richesse nationale: on vole quelque-chose à l'Etat en adoucissant la sonorité des ronrons: 'La France, Messieurs, manque de consonnes d'appui!' D'autre part, l'emploi de l'assonnance a quelque-chose de rétrograde qui froisse les vrais démocrates. * * * * * * * "Il est amusant de voir des gens qui ne doivent leur état 'd'hommes modernes' qu'à la fauchaison brutale de toutes les traditions Françaises, protester aussi sottement contre des innovations non seulement logiques, mais inévitables. Ce qui donne quelque valeur à leur acrimonie, c'est qu'ils ignorent tout de cette question si complexe; de là leur liberté critique, n'ayant lu ni Gaston Paris, ni Darmesteter, ni aucun des écrivains récents qui étudièrent avec prudence tant de points obscurs de la phonétique et de la rythmique, ils tirent une autorité évidente de leur incompétence même." _Le Vers Libre et les Prochaines Elections._
"PELERIN DU SILENCE" (1896) contains "Fleurs de Jadis" (1893), "Château Singulier" (1894), "Livres des Litanies," "Litanie de la Rose"[2] (1892), Théâtre Muet, "Le Fantôme" (1893).
"LIVRE DES MASQUES" (1896), not particularly important, though the preface contains a good reformulation: as, for example,
"Le crime capital pour un écrivain, c'est le conformisme, l'imitativité, la soumission aux règles et aux enseignements. L'œuvre d'un écrivain doit être non seulement le reflet, mais le reflet grossi de sa personnalité. La seule excuse qu'un homme ait d'écrire c'est de s'écrire lui-même, de dévoiler aux autres la sort de monde qui se mire en son miroir individuel; sa seule excuse est d'être original; il doit dire des choses non encore dites, et les dire en une forme non encore formulée. Il doit se créer sa propre esthétique--et nous devrons admettre autant d'esthétiques qu'il y a d'esprits originaux et les juger d'après ce qu'elles sont, et non d'après ce qu'elles ne sont pas. * * * * * * * "L'esthétique est devenue elle aussi, un talent personnel."[3] _Préface._
"Comme tous les écrivains qui sont parvenus à comprendre la vie, c'est-à-dire son inutilité immédiate, M. Francis Poictevin, bien que né romancier, a promptement renoncé au roman. * * * * * * * "Il est très difficile de persuader à de certains vieillards--vieux ou jeunes--qu'il n'y a pas de sujets; il n'y a en littérature qu'un sujet, celui qui écrit, et toute la littérature, c'est-à-dire toute la philosophie, peut surgir aussi bien à l'appel d'un chien écrasé qu'aux acclamations de Faust interpellant la Nature: 'Où te saisir, ô Nature infinie? Et vous, mamelles?'" _Francis Poictevin._
This book is of the '90s, of temporary interest, judgment in mid-career, less interesting now that the complete works of the subjects are available, or have faded from interest. This sort of criticism is a duty imposed on a man by his intelligence. The doing it a duty, a price exacted for his possession of intelligence.
In places the careless phrase, phrases careless of sense, in places the thing bien dit as in Verlaine. Here and there a sharp sentence, as
"M. Moréas ne comprendra jamais combien il est ridicule d'appeler Racine le Sophocle de la Ferté Milon." or:
"Parti de la chanson de Saint Léger, il en est, dit-on, arrivé au XVIIème. siècle, et cela en moins de dix années; ce n'est pas si décourageant qu'on l'a cru. Et maintenant que les textes se font plus familiers, la route s'abrège; d'ici peu de haltes, M. Moréas campera sous le vieux chêne Hugo et, s'il persévère, nous le verrons atteindre le but de son voyage, qui est sans doute de se rejoindre lui-même." _Jean Moréas._
This first "Livre des Masques" is of historical interest, as a list of men interesting at their time. It is work done in establishing good work, a necessary scaffolding, the debt to De Gourmont, because of it, is ethical rather than artistic. It is a worthy thing to have done. One should not reproach flaws, even if it appears that the author wastes time in this criticism, although this particular sort of half energy probably wouldn't have been any use for more creative or even more formulative writing. It is not a carving of statues, but only holding a torch for the public; ancillary writing. Local and temporal, introducing some men now better known and some, thank Heaven, unknown or forgotten.
"DEUXIÈME LIVRE DES MASQUES" (1898), rather more important, longer essays, subjects apparently chosen more freely, leaves one perhaps more eager to read Alfred Valette's "Le Vierge" than any other book mentioned.
"Etre nul arrêté dans son développement vers une nullité équilibrée."
We find typical Gourmont in the essay on Rictus:
"Ici c'est l'idée de la résignation qui trouble le Pauvre; comme tant d'autres, il la confond avec l'idée bouddhiste de non-activité. Cela n'a pas d'autre importance en un temps où l'on confond tout, et où un cerveau capable d'associer et de dissocier logiquement les idées doit être considéré comme une production miraculeuse de la Nature. * * * * * * * "Or l'art ne joue pas; il est grave, même quand il rit, même quand il danse. Il faut encore comprendre qu'en art tout ce qui n'est pas nécessaire est inutile; et tout ce qui est inutile est mauvais." _Jehan Rictus._
He almost convinces one of Ephraim Mikhail's poetry, by his skillful leading up to quotation of:
"Mais le ciel gris est plein de tristesse câline inéffablement douce aux cœurs chargés d'ennuis."
The essay on the Goncourt is important, and we find in it typical dissociation.
"Avec de la patience, on atteint quelquefois l'exactitude, et avec de la conscience, la véracité; ce sont les qualités fondamentales de l'histoire. * * * * * * "Quand on a goûté à ce vin on ne veut plus boire l'ordinaire vinasse des bas littérateurs. Si les Goncourt étaient devenus populaires, si la notion du style pouvait pénétrer dans les cerveaux moyens! On dit que le peuple d'Athêne avait cette notion. * * * * * * "Et surtout quel mémorable désintéressement! En tout autre temps nul n'aurait songé à louer Edmond de Goncourt pour ce dédain de l'argent et de la basse popularité, car l'amour est exclusif et celui qui aime l'art n'aime que l'art: mais après les exemples de toutes les avidités qui nous ont été donnés depuis vingt ans par les boursiers des lettres, par la coulisse de la littérature, il est juste et nécessaire de glorifier, en face de ceux qui vivent pour l'argent, ceux qui vécurent pour l'idée et pour l'art. * * * * * * "La place des Goncourt dans l'histoire littéraire de ce siècle sera peut-être même aussi grande que celle de Flaubert, et ils la devront à leur souci si nouveau, si scandaleux, en une littérature alors encore toute rhétoricienne, de la 'non-imitation'; cela a révolutionné le monde de l'écriture. Flaubert devait beaucoup à Chateaubriand: il serait difficile de nommer le maître des Goncourt. Ils conquirent pour eux, ensuite pour tous les talents, le droit à la personnalité stricte, le droit pour un écrivain de s'avouer tel quel, et rien qu'ainsi, sans s'inquiéter des modèles, des règles, de tout le pédantisme universitaire et cénaculaire, le droit de se mettre face-à-face avec la vie, avec la sensation, avec le rêve, avec l'idée, de créer sa phrase--et même, dans les limites du génie de la langue, sa syntaxe." _Les Goncourt._
One is rather glad M. Hello is dead. Ghil is mentionable, and the introductory note on Felix Fénéon is of interest.
Small reviews are praised in the notes on Dujardins and Alfred Vallette.
"Il n'y a rien de plus utile que ces revues spéciales dont le public élu parmi les vrais fidèles admet les discussions minutieuses, les admirations franches." _On Edouard Dujardins._
"Il arrive dans l'ordre littéraire qu'une revue fondée avec quinze louis a plus d'influence sur la marche des idées et par conséquent, sur la marche du monde (et peut-être sur la rotation des planètes) que les orgueilleux recueils de capitaux académiques et de dissertations commerciales." _On Alfred Voilette._
"PROMENADES PHILOSOPHIQUES" (1905-8). One cannot brief such work as the Promenades. The sole result is a series of aphorisms, excellent perhaps, but without cohesion; a dozen or so will show an intelligence, but convey neither style nor personality of the author:
"Sans doute la religion n'est pas vraie, mais l'anti-religion n'est pas vraie non plus: la vérité réside dans un état parfait d'indifférence. * * * * * * "Peu importe qu'on me sollicite par des écrits ou par des paroles; le mal ne commence qu'au moment où on m'y plie par la force." _Autre Point de Vue._
"L'argent est le signe de la liberté. Maudire l'argent, c'est maudire la liberté, c'est maudire la vie qui est nulle si elle n'est libre." _L'Argent._
"Quand on voudra définir la philosophie du XIXème siècle, on s'apercevra qu'il n'a fait que de la théologie. * * * * * * "Apprendre pour apprendre est peut-être aussi grossier que manger pour manger. * * * * * * "C'est singulier en littérature, quand la forme n'est pas nouvelle, le fond ne l'est pas non plus. * * * * * * "Le nu de l'art contemporain est un nu d'hydrothérapie. * * * * * * "L'art doit être à la mode ou créer la mode. * * * * * * "Les pacifistes, de braves gens à genoux, près d'une balance et priant le ciel qu'elle s'incline, non pas selon les lois de la pesanteur, mais selon leurs vœux. * * * * * * "La propriété est nécessaire, mais il ne l'est pas qu'elle reste toujours dans les mêmes mains. * * * * * * "Il y a une simulation de l'intelligence comme il y a une simulation de la vertu. * * * * * * "Le roman historique. Il y a aussi la peinture historique, l'architecture historique, et, à la mi-carême, le costume historique. * * * * * * "Etre impersonnel c'est être personnel selon un mode particulier: Voyez Flaubert. On dirait en jargon: l'objectif est une des formes du subjectif. * * * * * * "La maternité, c'est beau, tant qu'on n'y fait pas attention. C'est vulgaire dès qu'on admire. * * * * * * "L'excuse du christianisme, ça a été son impuissance sur la réalité. Il a corrompu l'esprit bien plus que la vie.
"Je ne garantis pas qu'aucune de ces notes ne se trouve déjà dans un de mes écrits, ou qu'elle ne figurera pas dans un écrit futur. On les retrouvera peut-être même dans des écrits qui ne seront pas les miens." _Des Pas sur le Sable._
Those interested in the subject will take "LE PROBLÈME DU STYLE" (1902) entire; the general position may perhaps be indicated very vaguely by the following quotations:
"Quant à la peur de se gâter le style, c'est bon pour un Bemho, qui use d'une langue factice. Le style peut se fatiguer comme l'homme même; il vieillira de même que l'intelligence et la sensibilité dont il est le signe; mais pas plus que l'individu, il ne changera de personnalité, à moins d'un cataclysme psychologique. Le régime alimentaire, le séjour à la campagne ou à Paris, les occupations sentimentales et leurs suites, les maladies ont bien plus d'influence sur un style vrai que les mauvaises lectures. Le style est un produit physiologique, et l'un des plus constants; quoique dans la dépendance des diverses fonctions vitales.
"Les États-Unis tomberaient en langueur, sans les voyages en Europe de leur aristocratie, sans la diversité extrême des climats, des sols et par conséquent des races en évolution dans ce vaste empire. Les échanges entre peuples sont aussi nécessaires à la révigoration de chaque peuple que le commerce social à l'exaltation de l'énergie individuelle. On n'a pas pris garde à cette nécessite quand on parle avec regret de l'influence des littératures étrangères sur notre littérature. * * * * * * "Aujourd'hui l'influence d'Euripide pourrait encore déterminer en un esprit original d'intéressantes œuvres; l'imitateur de Racine dépasserait à peine le comique involontaire. L'étude de Racine ne deviendra profitable que dans plusieurs siècles et seulement à condition que, complètement oublié, il semble entièrement nouveau, entièrement étranger, tel que le sont devenus pour le public d'aujourd'hui Adenès li Rois ou Jean de Meung. Euripide était nouveau au XVIIème siècle. Théocrite l'était alors que Chénier le transposait. 'Quand je fais des vers, insinuait Racine, je songe toujours à dire ce qui ne s'est point encore dit dans notre langue.' André Chénier a voulu exprimer celà aussi dans une phrase maladroite; et s'il ne l'a dit il l'a fait. Horace a bafoué les serviles imitateurs; il n'imitait pas les Grecs, il les étudiait. * * * * * * "'Le style est l'homme même' est un propos de naturaliste, qui sait que le chant des oiseaux est déterminé par la forme de leur bec, l'attache de leur langue, le diamètre de leur gorge, la capacité de leurs poumons. * * * * * * "Le style, c'est de sentir, de voir, de penser, et rien plus. * * * * * * "Le style est une spécialisation de la sensibilité. * * * * * * "Une idée n'est qu'une sensation défraîchie, une image effacée. * * * * * * "La vie est un dépouillement. Le but de l'activité propre d'un homme est de nettoyer sa personnalité, de la laver de toutes les souillures qu'y déposa l'éducation, de la dégager de toutes les empreintes qu'y laissèrent nos admirations adolescentes. * * * * * * "Depuis un siècle et demi, les connaissances scientifiques ont augmenté énormément; l'esprit scientifique a rétrogradé; il n'y a plus de contact immédiat entre ceux qui lisent et ceux qui créent la science, et (je cite pour la seconde fois la réflexion capitale de Buffon): 'On n'acquiert aucune connaissance transmissible qu'en voyant par soi-même': Les ouvrages de seconde main amusent l'intelligence et ne stimulent pas son activité. * * * * * * "Rien ne pousse à la concision comme l'abondance des idées." _Le Problème du Style_,1902.
Christianity lends itself to fanaticism. Barbarian ethics proceed by general taboos. The relation of two individuals in relation is so complex that no third person can pass judgment upon it. Civilization is individual. The truth is the individual. The light of the Renaissance shines in Varchi when he declines to pass judgment on Lorenzaccio.
One might make an index of, but one cannot write an essay upon, the dozen volumes of Gourmont's collected discussions. There was weariness towards the end of his life. It shows in even the leisurely charm of "Lettres à l'Amazone." There was a final flash in his drawing of M. Croquant.
The list of his chief works published by the Mercure de France, 26 Rue de Condé, Paris, is as follows:
"Sixtine." "Le Pèlerin du Silence." "Les Chevaux de Diomède." "D'un Pays Lointain." "Le Songe d'une Femme." "Lilith, suivi de Théodat." 'Une Nuit au Luxembourg." "Un Cœur Virginal." "Couleurs, suivi de Choses Anciennes." "Histoires Magiques." "Lettres d'un Satyre." "Le Chat de Misère. "Simone."
CRITIQUE
"Le Latin Mystique." "Le Livre des Masques" (Ier. et IIème.) "La Culture des Idées." "Le Chemin de Velours." "Le Problème du Style." "Physique de l'Amour." "Epilogues." "Esthétique de la Langue Française." "Promenades Littéraires." "Promenades Philosophiques." "Dialogue des Amateurs sur les Choses du Temps." "Nouveaux Dialogues des Amateurs sur les Choses du Temps." "Dante, Béatrice et la Poésie Amoureuse." "Pendant l'Orage."
De Gourmont's readiness to coöperate in my first plans for establishing some sort of periodical to maintain communications between New York, London and Paris, was graciously shown in the following (post-mark June 13, '15):
_Dimanche._
_Cher Monsieur:_
J'ai lu avec plaisir votre longue lettre, qui m'expose si clairement la nécessité d'une revue unissant les efforts des Américains, des Anglais, et des Français. Pour cela, je vous servirai autant qu'il sera en mon pouvoir. Je ne crois pas que je puisse beaucoup. J'ai une mauvaise santé et je suis extrêmement fatigué; je ne pourrai vous donner que des choses très courtes, des indications d'idées plutôt que des pages accomplies, mais je ferai de mon mieux. J'espère que vous réussirez à mettre debout cette petite affaire littéraire et que vous trouverez parmi nous des concours utiles. Evidemment si nous pourions amener les Américains à mieux sentir la vraie littérature française et surtout à ne pas la confondre avec tant d'œuvres courantes si médiocres, cela serait un résultat très heureux. Sont-ils capables d'assez de liberté d'esprit pour lire, sans être choqués, mes livres par example, elle est bien douteux et il faudrait pour cela un long travail de préparation. Mais pourquoi ne pas l'entreprendre? En tous les pays, il y a un noyau de bons esprits, d'esprits libres, il faut leur donner quelque chose qui les change de la fadeur des magazines, quelque chose qui leur donne confiance en eux-mêmes et leur soit un point d'appui. Comme vous le dites, il faudra pour commencer les amener à respecter l'individualisme français, le sens de la liberté que quelques uns d'entre nous possèdent à un si haut point. Ils comprennent cela en théologie. Pourquoi ne le comprendraient-ils pas en art, en poésie, en littérature, en philosophie. Il faut leur faire voir--s'ils ne le voient pas déjà--que l'individualisme français peut, quand il le faut, se plier aux plus dures disciplines.
Conquérir l'Américain n'est pas sans doute votre seul but. Le but du _Mercure_ a été de permettre à ceux qui en valent la peine d'écrire franchement ce qu'il pense--seul plaisir d'un écrivain. Cela doit aussi être le vôtre.
Votre bien dévoué, _Remy de Gourmont._
"The aim of the _Mercure_ has been to permit any man, who is worth it, to write down his thought frankly--this is a writer's sole pleasure. And this aim should be yours."
"Are they capable of enough mental liberty to read my books, for example, without being horrified? I think this very doubtful, and it will need long preparation. But why not try it? There are in all countries knots of intelligent people, open-minded; one must give something to relieve them from the staleness of magazines, something which will give them confidence in themselves and serve as a rallying point. As you say, one must begin by getting them to respect French individualism; the sense of liberty which some of us have in so great degree. They understand this in theology, why should they not understand it in art, poetry, literature?"
If only my great correspondent could have seen letters I received about this time from English alleged intellectuals! The incredible stupidity, the ingrained refusal of thought!!!!! Of which more anon, if I can bring myself to it. Or let it pass? Let us say simply that De Gourmont's words form an interesting contrast with the methods employed by the British literary episcopacy to keep one from writing what one thinks, or to punish one (financially) for having done so.
Perhaps as a warning to young writers who can not afford the loss, one would be justified in printing the following:
50_a. Albermarle Street, London W._
_22 October, '14:_
Dear Mr. Pound:
Many thanks for your letter of the other day. I am afraid I must say frankly that I do not think I can open the columns of the _Q.R._--at any rate, at present--to any one associated publicly with such a publication as _Blast._ It stamps a man too disadvantageously.
Yours truly, G.W. Prothero.
Of course, having accepted your paper on the _Noh_, I could not refrain from publishing it. But other things would be in a different category.
I need scarcely say that _The Quarterly Review_ is one of the most profitable periodicals in England, and one of one's best "connections," or sources of income. It has, of course, a tradition.
"It is not that Mr. Keats (if that be his real name, for we almost doubt that any man in his senses would put his real name to such a rhapsody)"--
write their Gifford of Keats' "Endymion." My only comment is that the _Quarterly_ has done it again. Their Mr. A. Waugh is a lineal descendant of Gifford, by way of mentality. A century has not taught them manners. In the eighteen forties they were still defending the review of Keats. And more recently Waugh has lifted up his senile slobber against Mr. Eliot. It is indeed time that the functions of both English and American literature were taken over by younger and better men.
As for their laying the birch on my pocket. I compute that my support of Lewis and Brzeska has cost me at the lowest estimate about £20 per year, from one source alone since that regrettable occurrence, since I dared to discern a great sculptor and a great painter in the midst of England's artistic desolation. ("European and Asiatic papers please copy.")
Young men, desirous of finding before all things smooth berths and elderly consolations, are cautioned to behave more circumspectly.
The generation that preceded us does not care much whether we understand French individualism, or the difference between the good and bad in French literature. Nor is it conceivable that any of them would write to a foreigner: "indications of ideas, rather than work accomplished, but I will send you my best."
De Gourmont's next communication to me was an inquiry about Gaudier-Brzeska's sculpture.
[1] "A German study," Hobson; "A German study," Tarr.
[2] Quoted in _L.R._, February, 1918.
[3] Each of the senses has its own particular eunuchs.
IV
IN THE VORTEX[1]
Eliot Joyce Lewis An historical essayist The new poetry Breviora
T.S. ELIOT
_Il n'y a de livres que ceux où un écrivain s'est raconté lui-même en racontant les mœurs de ses contemporains--leurs rêves, leurs vanités, leurs amours, et leurs folies_.-- Remy de Gourmont.
De Gourmont uses this sentence in writing of the incontestable superiority of "Madame Bovary," "L'Éducation Sentimentale" and "Bouvard et Pécuchet" to "Salammbô" and "La Tentation de St. Antoine." A casual thought convinces one that it is true for all prose. Is it true also for poetry? One may give latitude to the interpretation of _rêves_; the gross public would have the poet write little else, but De Gourmont keeps a proportion. The vision should have its place in due setting if we are to believe its reality.
The few poems which Mr. Eliot has given us maintain this proportion, as they maintain other proportions of art. After much contemporary work that is merely factitious, much that is good in intention but impotently unfinished and incomplete; much whose flaws are due to sheer ignorance which a year's study or thought might have remedied, it is a comfort to come upon complete art, naïve despite its intellectual subtlety, lacking all pretense.
It is quite safe to compare Mr. Eliot's work with anything written in French, English or American since the death of Jules Laforgue. The reader will find nothing better, and he will be extremely fortunate if he finds much half as good.
The necessity, or at least the advisability of comparing English or American work with French work is not readily granted by the usual English or American writer. If you suggest it, the Englishman answers that he has not thought about it--he does not see why he should bother himself about what goes on south of the channel; the American replies by stating that you are "no longer American." This is the bitterest jibe in his vocabulary. The net result is that it is extremely difficult to read one's contemporaries. After a time one tires of "promise."
I should like the reader to note how complete is Mr. Eliot's depiction of our contemporary condition. He has not confined himself to genre nor to society portraiture. His
lonely men in shirt-sleeves leaning out of windows
are as real as his ladies who
come and go Talking of Michelangelo.
His "one night cheap hotels" are as much "there" as are his
four wax candles in the darkened room, Four rings of light upon the ceiling overhead, An atmosphere of Juliet's tomb.
And, above all, there is no rhetoric, although there is Elizabethan reading in the background. Were I a French critic, skilled in their elaborate art of writing books about books, I should probably go to some length discussing Mr. Eliot's two sorts of metaphor: his wholly unrealizable, always apt, half ironic suggestion, and his precise realizable picture. It would be possible to point out his method of conveying a whole situation and half a character by three words of a quoted phrase; his constant aliveness, his mingling of very subtle observation with the unexpectedness of a backhanded cliché. It is, however, extremely dangerous to point out such devices. The method is Mr. Eliot's own, but as soon as one has reduced even a fragment of it to formula, some one else, not Mr. Eliot, some one else wholly lacking in his aptitudes, will at once try to make poetry by mimicking his external procedure. And this indefinite "some one" will, needless to say, make a botch of it.
For what the statement is worth, Mr. Eliot's work interests me more than that of any other poet now writing in English.[2] The most interesting poems in Victorian English are Browning's "Men and Women," or, if that statement is too absolute, let me contend that the form of these poems is the most vital form of that period of English, arid that the poems written in that form are the least like each other in content. Antiquity gave us Ovid's "Heroides" and Theocritus' woman using magic. The form of Browning's "Men and Women" is more alive than the epistolary form of the "Heroides." Browning included a certain amount of ratiocination and of purely intellectual comment, and in just that proportion he lost intensity. Since Browning there have been very few good poems of this sort. Mr. Eliot has made two notable additions to the list. And he has placed his people in contemporary settings, which is much more difficult than to render them with mediæval romantic trappings. If it is permitted to make comparison with a different art, let me say that he has used contemporary detail very much as Velasquez used contemporary detail in "Las Meninas"; the cold gray-green tones of the Spanish painter have, it seems to me, an emotional value not unlike the emotional value of Mr. Eliot's rhythms, and of his vocabulary.
James Joyce has written the best novel of my decade, and perhaps the best criticism of it has come from a Belgian who said, "All this is as true of my country as of Ireland." Eliot has a like ubiquity of application. Art does not avoid universals, it strikes at them all the harder in that it strikes through particulars. Eliot's work rests apart from that of the many new writers who have used the present freedoms to no advantage, who have gained no new precisions of language, and no variety in their cadence. His men in shirt-sleeves, and his society ladies, are not a local manifestation; they are the stuff of our; modern world, and true of more countries than one. I would praise the work for its fine tone, its humanity, and its realism; for all good art is realism of one sort or another.
It is complained that Eliot is lacking in emotion. "La Figlia che Piange" is an adequate confutation.
If the reader wishes mastery of "regular form," the "Conversation Galante" is sufficient to show that symmetrical form is within Mr. Eliot's grasp. You will hardly find such neatness save in France; such modern neatness, save in Laforgue.
De Gourmont's phrase to the contrary notwithstanding, the supreme test of a book is that we should feel some unusual intelligence working behind the words. By this test various other new books, that I have, or might have, beside me, go to pieces. The barrels of sham poetry that every decade and school and fashion produce, go to pieces. It is sometimes extremely difficult to find any other particular reason for their being so unsatisfactory. I have expressly written here not "intellect" but "intelligence." There is no intelligence without emotion. The emotion may be anterior or concurrent. There may be emotion without much intelligence, but that does not concern us.
_Versification:_
A conviction as to the rightness or wrongness of _vers libre_ is no guarantee of a poet. I doubt if there is much use trying to classify the various kinds of _vers libre_, but there is an anarchy which may be vastly overdone; and there is a monotony of bad usage as tiresome as any typical eighteenth or nineteenth century flatness.
In a recent article Mr. Eliot contended, or seemed to contend, that good _vers libre_ was little more than a skilful evasion of the better known English metres. His article was defective in that he omitted all consideration of metres depending on quantity, alliteration, etc.; in fact, he wrote as if metres were measured by accent. This may have been tactful on his part, it may have brought his article nearer to the comprehension of his readers (that is, those of the "New Statesman," people chiefly concerned with sociology of the "button" and "unit" variety). But he came nearer the fact when he wrote elsewhere: "No _vers_ is _libre_ for the man who wants to do a good job."
Alexandrine and other grammarians have made cubbyholes for various groupings of syllables; they have put names upon them, and have given various labels to "metres" consisting of combinations of these different groups. Thus it would be hard to escape contact with some group or other; only an encyclopedist could ever be half sure he had done so. The known categories would allow a fair liberty to the most conscientious traditionalist. The most fanatical vers-librist will escape them with difficulty. However, I do not think there is any crying need for verse with absolutely no rhythmical basis.
On the other hand, I do not believe that Chopin wrote to a metronome. There is undoubtedly a sense of music that takes count of the "shape" of the rhythm in a melody rather than of bar divisions, which came rather late in the history of written music and were certainly not the first or most important thing that musicians attempted to record. The creation of such shapes is part of thematic invention. Some musicians have the faculty of invention, rhythmic, melodic. Likewise some poets.
Treatises full of musical notes and of long and short marks have never been convincingly useful. Find a man with thematic invention and all he can say is that he gets what the Celts call a "chune" in his head, and that the words "go into it," or when they don't "go into it" they "stick out and worry him."
You can not force a person to play a musical masterpiece correctly, even by having the notes "correctly" printed on the paper before him; neither can you force a person to feel the movement of poetry, be the metre "regular" or "irregular." I have heard Mr. Yeats trying to read Burns, struggling in vain to fit the "Birks o' Aberfeldy" and "Bonnie Alexander" into the mournful keen of the "Wind among the Reeds." Even in regular metres there are incompatible systems of music.
I have heard the best orchestral conductor in England read poems in free verse, poems in which the rhythm was so faint as to be almost imperceptible. He read them with the author's cadence, with flawless correctness. A distinguished statesman read from the same book, with the intonations of a legal document, paying no attention to the movement inherent in the words before him. I have heard a celebrated Dante scholar and mediæval enthusiast read the sonnets of the "Vita Nuova" as if they were not only prose, but the ignominious prose of a man devoid of emotions: an utter castration.
The leader of orchestra said to me, "There is more for a musician in a few lines with something rough or uneven, such as Byron's
There be none of Beauty's daughters With a magic like thee;
than in whole pages of regular poetry."
Unless a man can put some thematic invention into _vers libre_, he would perhaps do well to stick to "regular" metres, which have certain chances of being musical from their form, and certain other chances of being musical through his failure in fitting the form. In _vers libre_ his musical chances are but in sensitivity and invention.
Mr. Eliot is one of the very few who have given a personal rhythm, an identifiable quality of sound as well as of style. And at any rate, his
## book is the best thing in poetry since ... (for the sake of peace I will
leave that date to the imagination). I have read most of the poems many times; I last read the whole book at breakfast time and from flimsy proof-sheets: I believe these are "test conditions." And, "confound it, the fellow can write."
JOYCE[3]
Despite the War, despite the paper shortage, and despite those old-established publishers whose god is their belly and whose god-father was the late F.T. Palgrave, there is a new edition of James Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man."[4] It is extremely gratifying that this book should have "reached its fourth thousand," and the fact is significant in just so far as it marks the beginning of a new phase of English publishing, a phase comparable to that started in France some years ago by the _Mercure._
The old houses, even those, or even _more_ those, which once had a literary tradition, or at least literary pretensions, having ceased to care a damn about literature, the lovers of good writing have "struck"; have sufficiently banded themselves together to get a few good books into print, and even into circulation. The actual output is small in bulk, a few brochures of translations, Eliot's "Prufrock," Joyce's "A Portrait," and Wyndham Lewis' "Tarr," but I have it on good authority that at least one other periodical will start publishing its authors after the War, so there are new rods in pickle for the old fat-stomached contingent and for the cardboard generation.
Joyce's "A Portrait" is literature; it has become almost the prose bible of a few people, and I think I have encountered at least three hundred admirers of the book, certainly that number of people who, whether they "like" it or not, are wholly convinced of its merits.
Mr. Wells I have encountered in print, where he says that Joyce has a cloacal obsession, _but_ he also says that Mr. Joyce writes literature and that his book is to be ranked with the works of Sterne and of Swift.
Wells is no man to babble of obsessions, but let it stand to his honor that he came out with a fine burst of admiration for a younger and half-known writer.
From England and America there has come a finer volume of praise for this novel than for any that I can remember. There has also come impotent spitting and objurgation from the back-woods and from Mr. Dent's office boy, and, as offset, interesting comment in modern Greek, French and Italian.
Joyce's poems have been reprinted by Elkin Mathews, his short stories re-issued, and a second novel started in "The Little Review."
For all the book's being so familiar, it is pleasant to take up "A Portrait" in its new exiguous form, and one enters many speculations, perhaps more than when one read it initially. It is not that one can open to a forgotten page so much as that wherever one opens there is always a place to start; some sentence like--
"Stephen looked down coldly on the oblong skull beneath him overgrown with tangled twine-colored hair";
_or_
"Frowsy girls sat along the curbstones before their baskets"; _or_
"He drained his third cup of watery tea to the dregs and set to chewing the crusts of fried bread that were scattered near him, staring into the dark pool of the jar. The yellow dripping had been scooped out like a boghole, and the pool under it brought back to his memory the dark turf-colored water of the bath in Clongowes. The box of pawntickets at his elbow had just been rifled, and he took up idly one after another in his greasy fingers the blue and white dockets, scrawled and sanded and creased and bearing the name of the pledger as Daly or MacEvoy.
"1 Pair Buskins, &c."
I do not mean to imply that a novel is necessarily a bad novel because one can pick it up without being in this manner caught and dragged into reading; but I do indicate the curiously seductive interest of the clear-cut and definite sentences.
Neither, emphatically, is it to be supposed that Joyce's writing is merely a depiction of the sordid. The sordid is there in all conscience as you would find it in De Goncourt, but Joyce's power is in his scope. The reach of his writing is from the fried breadcrusts and from the fig-seeds in Cranley's teeth to the casual discussion of Aquinas:
"He wrote a hymn for Maundy Thursday. It begins with the words _Pange lingua gloriosi_. They say it is the highest glory of the hymnal. It is an intricate and soothing hymn. I like it; but there is no hymn that can be put beside that mournful and majestic processional song, the Vexilla Regis of Venantius Fortunatus.
"Lynch began to sing softly and solemnly in a deep bass voice:
'Impleta sunt quae concinit David fideli carmine....'
"They turned into Lower Mount Street. A few steps from the corner a fat young man, wearing a silk neck-cloth, &c."
On almost every page of Joyce you will find just such swift alternation of subjective beauty and external shabbiness, squalor, and sordidness. It is the bass and treble of his method. And he has his scope beyond that of the novelists his contemporaries, in just so far as whole stretches of his keyboard are utterly out of their compass.
The conclusion or moral termination from all of which is that the great writers of any period must be the remarkable minds of that period; they must know the extremes of their time; they must not represent a _social status_; they cannot be the "Grocer" or the "Dilettante" with the egregious and capital letter, nor yet the professor or the professing wearer of Jaeger or professional eater of herbs.
In the three hundred pages of "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" there is no omission; there is nothing in life so beautiful that Joyce cannot touch it without profanation--without, above all, the profanations of sentiment and sentimentality--and there is nothing so sordid that he cannot treat it with his metallic exactitude.
I think there are few people who can read Shaw, Wells, Bennett, or even Conrad (who is in a category apart) without feeling that there are values and tonalities to which these authors are wholly insensitive. I do not imply that there cannot be excellent art within quite distinct limitations, but the artist cannot afford to be or to appear ignorant of such limitations; he cannot afford a pretense of such ignorance. He must almost choose his limitations. If he paints a snuff-box or a stage scene he must not be ignorant of the fact, he must not think he is painting a landscape, three feet by two feet, in oils.
I think that what tires me more than anything else in the writers now past middle age is that they always seem co imply that they are giving us all modern life, the whole social panorama, all the instruments of the orchestra. Joyce is of another donation.
His earlier book, "Dubliners," contained several well-constructed stories, several sketches rather lacking in form. It was a definite promise of what was to come. There is very little to be said in praise of it which would not apply with greater force to "A Portrait." I find that whoever reads one book inevitably sets out in search of the other.
The quality and distinction of the poems in the first half of Mr. Joyce's "Chamber Music" (new edition, published by Elkin Mathews, 4A, Cork Street, W.1, at 1_s_. 3_d_.) is due in part to their author's strict musical training. We have here the lyric in some of its best traditions, and one pardons certain trifling inversions, much against the taste of the moment, for the sake of the cleancut ivory finish, and for the interest of the rhythms, the cross run of the beat and the word, as of a stiff wind cutting the ripple-tops of bright water.
The wording is Elizabethan, the metres at times suggesting Herrick, but in no case have I been able to find a poem which is not in some way Joyce's own, even though he would seem, and that most markedly, to shun apparent originality, as in:
Who goes amid the green wood With springtide all adorning her? Who goes amid the merry green wood To make it merrier?
Who passes in the sunlight By ways that know the light footfall? Who passes in the sweet sunlight With mien so virginal?
The ways of all the woodland Gleam with a soft and golden fire-- For whom does all the sunny woodland Carry so brave attire?
O, it is for my true love The woods their rich apparel wear-- O, it is for my true love, That is so young and fair.
Here, as in nearly every poem, the motif is so slight that the poem scarcely exists until one thinks of it as set to music; and the workmanship is so delicate that out of twenty readers scarce one will notice its fineness. If Henry Lawes were alive again he might make the suitable music, for the cadence is here worthy of his cunning:
O, it is for my true love, That is so young and fair.
The musician's work is very nearly done for him, and yet how few song-setters could be trusted to finish it and to fill in an accompaniment.
The tone of the book deepens with the poem beginning:
O sweetheart, hear you Your lover's tale; A man shall have sorrow When friends him fail.
For he shall know then Friends be untrue; And a little ashes Their words come to.
The collection comes to its end and climax in two profoundly emotional poems; quite different in tonality and in rhythm-quality, from the lyrics in the first part of the book:--
All day I hear the noise of waters Making moan, Sad as the sea-bird is, when going Forth alone, He hears the wind cry to the waters' Monotone.
The gray winds, the cold winds are blowing Where I go. I hear the noise of many waters Far below. All day, all night, I hear them flowing To and fro.
The third and fifth lines should not be read with an end stop. I think the rush of the words will escape the notice of scarcely any one. The phantom hearing in this poem is coupled, in the next poem, to phantom vision, and to a _robustezza_ of expression:
I hear an army charging upon the land, And the thunder of horses plunging, foam about their knees; Arrogant, in black armour, behind them stand, Disdaining the reins, with fluttering whips, the charioteers.
They cry unto the night their battle-name; I moan in sleep when I hear afar their whirling laughter; They cleave the gloom of dreams, a blinding flame, Clanging, clanging upon the heart as upon an anvil.
They come shaking in triumph their long green hair; They come out of the sea and run shouting by the shore: My heart, have you no wisdom thus to despair? My love, my love, my love, why have you left me alone?
In both these poems we have a strength and a fibrousness of sound which almost prohibits the thought of their being "set to music," or to any music but that which is in them when spoken; but we notice a similarity of the technique to that of the earlier poems, in so far as the beauty of movement is produced by a very skilful, or perhaps we should say a deeply intuitive, interruption of metric mechanical regularity. It is the irregularity which has shown always in the best periods.
The book is an excellent antidote for those who find Mr. Joyce's prose "disagreeable" and who at once fly to conclusions about Mr. Joyce's "cloacal obsessions." I have yet to find in Joyce's published works a violent or malodorous phrase which does not justify itself not only by its verity, but by its heightening of some opposite effect, by the poignancy which it imparts to some emotion or to some thwarted desire for beauty. Disgust with the sordid is but another expression of a sensitiveness to the finer thing. There is no perception of beauty without a corresponding disgust. If the price for such artists as James Joyce is exceeding heavy, it is the artist himself who pays, and if Armageddon has taught us anything it should have taught us to abominate the half-truth, and the tellers of the half-truth in literature.
ULYSSES
Incomplete as I write this. His profoundest work, most significant--"Exiles" was a side-step, necessary katharsis, clearance of mind from continental contemporary thought--"Ulysses," obscure, even obscene, as life itself is obscene in places, but an impassioned meditation on life.
He has done what Flaubert set out to do in "Bouvard and Pécuchet," done it better, more succinct. An epitome.
"Bloom" answers the query that people made after "The Portrait." Joyce has created his second character; he has moved from autobiography to the creation of the complimentary figure. Bloom on life, death, resurrection, immortality. Bloom and the Venus de Milo.
Bloom brings life into the book. All Bloom is vital. Talk of the other characters, cryptic, perhaps too particular, incomprehensible save to people who know Dublin, at least by hearsay, and who have university education plus mediævalism. But unavoidable or almost unavoidable, given the subject and the place of the subject.
NOTE: I am tired of rewriting the arguments for the realist novel; besides there is nothing to add. The Brothers de Goncourt said the thing once and for all, but despite the lapse of time their work is still insufficiently known to the American reader. The program in the preface to "Germinie Lacerteux" states the case and the whole case for realism; one can not improve the statement. I therefore give it entire, ad majoram Dei gloriam.
"PRÉFACE
_De la première édition_
Il nous faut demander pardon au public de lui donner ce livre, et l'avertir de ce qu'il y trouvera.
Le public aime les romans faux: ce roman est un roman vrai.
Il aime les livres qui font semblant d'aller dans le monde: ce livre vient de la rue.
Il aime les petites œuvres polissonnes, les mémoires de filles, les confessions d'alcôves, les saletés érotiques, le scandale qui se retrousse dans une image aux devantures des libraires, ce qu'il va lire est sévère et pur. Qu'il ne s'attende point à la photographie décolletée du plaisir: l'étude qui suit est la clinique de l'Amour.
Le public aime encore les lectures anodines et consolantes, les aventures qui finissent bien, les imaginations qui ne dérangent ni sa digestion ni sa sérénité: ce livre, avec sa triste et violente distraction, est fait pour contrarier ses habitudes et nuire à son hygiène.
Pourquoi donc l'avons-nous écrit? Est-ce simplement pour choquer le public et scandaliser ses goûts?
Non.
Vivant au dix-neuvième siècle, dans un temps de suffrage universel, de démocratie, de libéralisme, nous nous sommes demandé si ce qu'on appelle "les basses classes" n'avait pas droit au roman; si ce monde sous un monde, le peuple, devait rester sous le coup de l'interdit littéraire et des dédains d'auteurs qui ont fait jusqu'ici le silence sur l'âme et le cœur qu'il peut avoir. Nous nous sommes demandé s'il y avait encore, pour l'écrivain et pour le lecteur, en ces années d'égalité où nous sommes, des classes indignes, des malheurs trop bas, des drames trop mal embouchés, des catastrophes d'une terreur trop peu noble. Il nous est venu la curiosité de savoir si cette forme conventionnelle d'une littérature oubliée et lune société disparue, la Tragédie, était définitivement morte; si, dans un pas sans caste et sans aristocratie légale, les misères des petits et des pauvres parleraient à l'intérêt, à l'émotion, à la pitié aussi haut que les misères des grands et des riches; si, en un mot, les larmes qu'on pleure en bas pourraient faire pleurer comme celles qu'on pleure en haut.
Ces pensées nous avaient fait oser l'humble roman de "Sœur Philomène," en 1861; elles nous font publier aujourd'hui "Germinie Lacerteux."
Maintenant, que ce livre soit calomnié: peu lui importe. Aujourd'hui que le Roman s'élargit et grandit, qu'il commence à être la grande forme sérieuse, passionnée, vivante, de l'étude littéraire et de l'enquête sociale, qu'il devient, par l'analyse et par la recherche psychologique, l'Histoire morale contemporaine, aujourd'hui que le Roman s'est imposé les études et les devoirs de la science, il peut en revendiquer les libertés et les franchises. Et qu'il cherche l'Art et la Vérité; qu'il montre des misères bonnes à ne pas laisser oublier aux heureux de Paris; qu'il fasse voir aux gens du monde ce que les dames de charité ont le courage de voir, ce que les reines d'autrefois faisaient toucher de l'œil à leurs enfants dans les hospices: la souffrance humaine, présente et toute vive, qui apprend la charité; que le Roman ait cette religion que le siècle passé appelait de ce large et vaste nom: _Humanité_; il lui suffit de cette conscience: son droit est là.
_E. et J. de G."_
WYNDHAM LEWIS
The signal omission from my critical papers is an adequate book on Wyndham Lewis; my excuses, apart from the limitations of time, must be that Mr. Lewis is alive and quite able to speak for himself, secondly, that one may print half-tone reproductions of sculpture, for however unsatisfactory they be, they pretend to be only half-tones, and could not show more than they do; but the reproduction of drawings and painting invites all sorts of expensive process impracticable during the years of war. When the public or the "publishers" are ready for a volume of Lewis, suitably illustrated, I am ready to write in the letterpress, though Mr. Lewis would do it better than I could.
He will rank among the great instigators and great inventors of design; there is mastery in his use of various media (my own interest in his work centres largely in the "drawing" completed with inks, water-color, chalk, etc.). His name is constantly bracketed with that of Gaudier, Piccasso, Joyce, but these are fortuitous couplings. Lewis' painting is further from the public than were the carvings of Gaudier; Lewis is an older artist, maturer, fuller of greater variety and invention. His work is almost unknown to the public. His name is wholly familiar, BLAST is familiar, the "Timon" portfolio has been seen.
I had known him for seven years, known him as an artist, but I had no idea of his scope until he began making his preparations to go into the army; so careless had he been of any public or private approval. The "work" lay in piles on the floor of an attic; and from it we gathered most of the hundred or hundred and twenty drawings which now form the bases of the Quinn collection and of the Baker collection, (now in the South Kensington museum).
As very few people have seen all of these pictures very few people are in any position to contradict me. There are three of his works in this room and I can attest their wearing capacity; as I can attest the duration of my regret for the Red drawing now in the Quinn collection which hung here for some months waiting shipment; as I can attest the energy and vitality that filled this place while forty drawings of the Quinn assortment stood here waiting also; a demonstration of the difference between "cubism," _nature-morte-ism_ and the vortex of Lewis: sun, energy, sombre emotion, clean-drawing, disgust, penetrating analysis from the qualities finding literary expression in "Tarr" to the stasis of the Red Duet, from the metallic gleam of the "Timon" portfolio to the velvet-suavity of the later "Timon" of the Baker collection.
The animality and the animal satire, the dynamic and metallic properties, the social satire, on the one hand, the sunlight, the utter cleanness of the Red Duet, are all points in an astounding circumference; which will, until the work is adequately reproduced, have more or less to be taken on trust by the "wider" public.
The novel "Tarr" is in print and no one need bother to read my critiques of it. It contains much that Joyce's work does not contain, but differentiations between the two authors are to the detriment of neither, one tries solely to discriminate qualities: hardness, fullness, abundance, weight, finish, all terms used sometimes with derogatory and sometimes with laudative intonation, or at any rate valued by one auditor and depreciated by another. The English prose fiction of my decade is the work of this pair of authors.
"TARR," BY WYNDHAM LEWIS[5]
"Tarr" is the most vigorous and volcanic English novel of our time. Lewis is the rarest of phenomena, an Englishman who has achieved the triumph of being also a European. He is the only English writer who can be compared with Dostoievsky, and he is more rapid than Dostoievsky, his mind travels with greater celerity, with more unexpectedness, but he loses none of Dostoievsky's effect of mass and of weight.
Tarr is a man of genius surrounded by the heavy stupidities of the half-cultured latin quarter; the book delineates his explosions in this oleaginous milieu; as well as the débâcle of the unintelligent emotion-dominated Kreisler. They are the two titanic characters in contemporary English fiction. Wells's clerks, Bennett's "cards" and even Conrad's Russian villains do not "bulk up" against them.
Only in James Joyce's "Stephen Dedalus" does one find an equal intensity, and Joyce is, by comparison, cold and meticulous, where Lewis is, if uncouth, at any rate brimming with energy, the man with a leaping mind.
Despite its demonstrable faults I do not propose to attack this novel.[6] It is a serious work, it is definitely an attempt to express, and very largely a success in expressing, something. The "average novel," the average successful commercial proposition at 6_s_. per 300 to 600 pages is nothing of the sort; it is merely a third-rate mind's imitation of a perfectly well-known type-novel; of let us say Dickens, or Balzac, or Sir A. Conan-Doyle, or Hardy, or Mr. Wells, or Mrs. Ward, or some other and less laudable proto-or necro-type.
A certain commercial interest attaches to the sale of these mimicries and a certain purely technical or trade or clique interest may attach to the closeness or "skill" of the aping, or to the "application" of a formula. The "work," the opus, has a purely narcotic value, it serves to soothe the tired mind of the reader, to take said "mind" off its "business" (whether that business be lofty, "intellectual," humanitarian, sordid, acquisitive, or other). There is only one contemporary English work with which "Tarr" can be compared, namely James Joyce's utterly different "Portrait of the Artist." The appearance of either of these novels would be a recognized literary event had it occurred in any other country in Europe.
Joyce's novel is a triumph of actual writing. The actual arrangement of the words is worth any author's study. Lewis on the contrary, is, in the actual writing, faulty. His expression is as bad as that of Meredith's floppy sickliness. In place of Meredith's mincing we have something
## active and "disagreeable." But we have at any rate the
percussions of a highly energized mind.
In both Joyce and Lewis we have the insistent utterance of men who are once for all through with the particular inanities of Shavian-Bennett, and with the particular oleosities of the Wellsian genre.
The faults of Mr. Lewis' writing can be examined in the first twenty-five pages. Kreisler is the creation of the book. He is roundly and objectively set before us. Tarr is less clearly detached from his creator. The author has evidently suspected this, for he has felt the need of disclaiming Tarr in a preface.
Tarr, like his author, is a man with an energized mind. When Tarr talks at length; when Tarr gets things off his chest, we suspect that the author also is getting them off his own chest. Herein the technique is defective. It is also defective in that it proceeds by general descriptive statements in many cases where the objective presentment of single and definite acts would be more effective, more convincing.
It differs from the general descriptiveness of cheap fiction in that these general statements are often a very profound reach for the expression of verity. In brief, the author is trying to get the truth and not merely playing baby-battledore among phrases. When Tarr talks little essays and makes aphorisms they are often of intrinsic interest, are even unforgettable. Likewise, when the author comments upon Tarr, he has the gift of phrase, vivid, biting, pregnant, full of suggestion.
The engaging if unpleasant character, Tarr, is placed in an unpleasant milieu, a milieu very vividly "done." The reader retains no doubts concerning the verity and existence of this milieu (Paris or London is no matter, though the scene is, nominally, in Paris). It is the existence where:
"Art is the smell of oil paint, Henri Murger's _Vie de Bohême_, corduroy trousers, the operatic Italian model ... quarter given up to Art.--Letters and other things are round the corner.
"... permanent tableaux of the place, disheartening as a Tussaud's of The Flood."
Tarr's first impact is with "Hobson," whose "dastardly face attempted to portray delicacies of common sense, and gossamer-like back-slidings into the Inane, that would have puzzled a bile-specialist. He would occasionally exploit his blackguardly appearance and black-smith's muscles for a short time ... his strong piercing laugh threw A.B.C. waitresses into confusion."
This person wonders if Tarr is a "sound bird." Tarr is not a sound bird. His conversational attack on Hobson proceeds by a brandishing of false dilemma, but neither Hobson nor his clan, nor indeed any of the critics of the novel (to date) have observed that this is Tarr's faulty weapon. Tarr's contempt for Hobson is as adequate as it is justifiable.
"Hobson, he considered, was a crowd.--You could not say he was an individual.--He was a set. He sat there a cultivated audience.--He had the aplomb and absence of self-consciousness of numbers, of the herd--of those who know they are not alone....
"For distinguishing feature Hobson possessed a distinguished absence of personality.... Hobson was an humble investor."
Tarr addresses him with some frankness on the subject:
"As an off-set for your prying, scurvy way of peeping into my affairs you must offer your own guts, such as they are....
"You have joined yourself to those who hush their voices to hear what other people are saying....
"Your plumes are not meant to fly with, but merely to slouch and skip along the surface of the earth.--You wear the livery of a ridiculous set, you are a cunning and sleek domestic. No thought can come out of your head before it has slipped on its uniform. All your instincts are drugged with a malicious languor, an arm, a respectability, invented by a set of old women and mean, cadaverous little boys."
Hobson opened his mouth, had a movement of the body to speak. But he relapsed.
"You reply, 'What is all this fuss about? I have done the best for myself.'--I am not suited for any heroic station, like yours. I live sensibly, cultivating my vegetable ideas, and also my roses and Victorian lilies.--I do no harm to anybody."
"That is not quite the case. That is a little inexact. Your proceedings possess a herdesque astuteness; in the scale against the individual weighing less than the Yellow Press, yet being a closer and meaner attack. Also you are essentially _spies_, in a scurvy, safe and well-paid service, as I told you before. You are disguised to look like the thing it is your function to betray--What is your 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 perfectly 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 from the Wilde decade, are a stronger body. The Chelsea 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 nineties, the wardrobe-leavings of a vulgar Bohemianism with its headquarters 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 systematizing and vulgarizing of the individual.--You are not an individual...."
and later:
"You are libeling the Artist, by your idleness." 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 Russian than Anglo-Victorian, but Lewis is not a mere echo of Dostoievsky. He hustles his reader, jolts him, snarls at him, in contra-distinction to Dostoievsky, who merely surrounds him with an enveloping dreariness, and imparts 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, combustible 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 restaurants and cafés, against the frowsy background of "Bourgeois Bohemia," more or less Bloomsbury. 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 not 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-energized mind performing a huge act of scavenging; cleaning up a great lot of rubbish, cultural, Bohemian, romantico-Tennysonish, arty, societish, gutterish.
It is not an attack on the _épicier_. It is an attack on a sort of _super-épicier_ desiccation. It is by no means a tract. If Hobson is so drawn as to disgust one with the "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: Fräulein Lippmann, Fräulein Fogs, etc.
What we are blessedly free from is the red-plush Wellsian illusionism, and the click of Mr. Bennett's cash-register finish. The book does not skim over the surface. If it does not satisfy the mannequin demand for "beauty" it at least refuses to accept margarine substitutes. It will not be praised by Katherine Tynan, nor by Mr. Chesterton and Mrs. Meynell. It will not receive 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 Fräulein Lippmann and a good many other people came. He maintained the rule of four to seven, roughly, for Bertha, with the uttermost punctiliousness. Anastasya and Bertha did not meet.
"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 lived with a brooding severity in his company, and that of her only child.
"Tarr and Anastasya did not marry. They had no children. Tarr, however, had three children by a Lady of the name of Rose Fawcett, who consoled him eventually for the splendors of his 'perfect woman.' But yet 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 required the painted, fine and inquiring face of Prism Dirkes."
Neither this well-written 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 machinery, 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 discussion 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. Any careful statement of this sort is bound to be _bafoué,_ 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 intelligence. The book was written before 1914, but the depiction of the German was not a piece of war propaganda.
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. The howls going up in the Times Lit. 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 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 undertaken 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 Kingdom of Heaven was open to him. "Heavenly ambitions" 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 exercise, and can in its finest developments be used for sharpening the wits, developing the rational faculties (_vide_ Aquinas). Theology, straying from the enclosures of religion, enters the purlieus of philosophy, and in some cases exacts stiff definitions.
Froude, Newman and Keble were part of an unfortunate retrogression, or, as Mr. Strachey has written, "Christianity had become entangled in a series of unfortunate circumstances from which it was the plain duty of Newman and his friends to rescue it." Keble desired an England "more superstitious, more bigoted, more gloomy, more fierce in its religion." _Tracts for the 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 difference 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 embedded 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 the taste displayed in the official literature of the last administration you must read anthologies printed between 1785 and 1837.)
Mr. Strachey's study of Manning is particularly valuable in a time when people still persist in not understanding the Papal church as a political organization exploiting a religion; its force, doubtless, has come, 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, 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 Victorian character.
Still it is hard to see how any people save those
_che hannoo perduto il ben del intelletto_
could have swallowed such shell-game propositions as those of Manning's, quoted on p. 98, 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 metaphysics, 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 physician Hall that no amount of apologia will reinstate them. Panmure is left as a goose, and Hawes as a goose with a touch of malevolence.
Queen Victoria 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 Consort, bore a St. George's cross in red enamel, and the Royal cypher surmounted by diamonds. The whole was 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 doctrine 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 Zeus Sens _ὃσις ποτ' ἐσὶν_, that being an American, 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 extraordinary crank, General Gordon. It takes him two 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 can but hope that this book will not be his last; one would 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 appears to have been as intelligent as any other form of Christianity, and to have had much the same active effects. However, Gordon was appointed to oppose it. Throughout the rest of his life he seems to have been obsessed by the curious medæval fallacy that the world is vanity and the body but ashes and dust. He fell victim 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 conviction 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_ form 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 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 her intellectual communications with the Continent. An era of bigotry supervened. We have so thoroughly forgotten, if we ever knew, the mental conditions preceding 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 case we are glad to be out of it ... irregardless of what we may be into; irregardless of whether the communications among intelligent people are but the mirage of a minute Thebaid seen from a chaos wholly insuperable.[7]
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 contemporary use, some system of delayed book reviewing, some system whereby the critic of current things is permitted to state that a few books read with pleasure five or six years ago can still be with pleasure perused, and 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 during 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 charmingly 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 _mœurs contemporaines_ are so few, or rather there are so few of them who can be treated under the heading "literature," that the discovery or circulation 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 impression is that he is not widely read in America (his publishers 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," "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 defunct 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 beneath his table he kept an hundred kings with their thumbs and great toes cut off, as signs of his power and clemency. When Merodach had finished eating 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 manner 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 applauded him."
Adam is afterwards discovered trespassing in Merodach'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 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 Tennyson uses six "s's" and one "z" in a single line. It is one of the most musical lines in Provençal and opens a poem especially commended by Dante. Let us leave the realm of promoted typists who quote the stock phrases of text-books.)
In the verse of Marianne Moore I detect traces of emotion; in that of Mina Loy I detect no emotion whatever. Both of these women are, possibly in unconsciousness, among the followers of Jules Laforgue (whose work shows a great deal of emotion). Or perhaps René Ghil is the "influence" in Miss Moore's case. It is possible, as I have written, or intended to write elsewhere, to divide poetry into three sorts: (1) melopoeia, to wit, poetry which moves by its music, whether it be a music in words or an aptitude for, or suggestion of, accompanying music; (2) imagism, or poetry wherein the feelings of painting and sculpture are predominant (certain 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 limited range. The intelligence of Laforgue ran through 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" enthusiast 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 hovering upon the brink of that precipice. It is of those who have acceded with Renan "La bêtise humaine est la seule chose qui donne une idée de l'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 tempérament de l'Américaine_, is in the poems of these, I think, graduates or post-graduates. If they have not 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 unintelligent readers into a fury of rage-out-of-puzzlement.) Both these poetriæ have said a number of things not to be found in the current numbers of _Everybody's,_ the _Century_ or _McClure's_, "The Effectual Marriage," "French Peacock," "My Apish Cousins," have each in its way given me pleasure. Miss Moore has already prewritten her counterblast to my criticism in her poem "to a Steam Roller."
The anthology displays also Mr. Williams' praiseworthy opacity.
THE NEW POETRY
English and French literature have stood in constant need of each other, and it is interesting to note, as concurrent but in no way dependent upon the present alliance, 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; let us observe his poem "The Hippopotamus," as it appears in _The Little Review._
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 Church 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
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 Théophile Gautier; as definitely as Eliot's "Conversation 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 Théophile Gautier. I quote the two present poems simply 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" Anthologies and their descendants and derivatives as upheld by _The New Statesman_, that nadir of the planet of hebetude, that apogee of the kulturesque.
CONVERSATION GALANTE[8]
I observe: "Our sentimental friend the moon! Or possibly (fantastic, I confess) 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 influence or Ghil's or some kindred tendency 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 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 Erect in you has withered. 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 swish ful Swinburniania will doubtless dart back appalled by Miss Moore's departures from custom; custom, that is, as the male or female devotee of Palgravian insularity understands that highly elastic term. The Palgravian will then with disappointment 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 libre_. It possesses a strophic structure. The elderly Newboltian groans. The all-wool unbleached Georgian sighs ominously. Another author has 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 international influence; there are lines in her "Ineffectual 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."
These lines are not written as Henry Davray said recently in the "Mercure de France," that the last "Georgian Anthology" poems are written, _i.e._, in search for "sentiments pour les accommoder à leur vocabulaire." Miss Loy's are distinctly the opposite, they are words set down to convey a definite meaning, and words accommodated 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, according 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 whimsicalities 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 conviction 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" (published by Elkin Mathews), in the verse to "The Coroner's Children," for example. There is distinctness and color, as was shown in his "Postlude," in "Des Imagistes"; 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 him six years ago in "The Postlude," full of a thick and opaque color, full of emotional richness, with a maximum of subjective reality:
POSTLUDE
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 Philæ, 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.
From 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; 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? ----and no jewelry (the crazy fools).
But I've my two eyes and a smooth face and here's this! look! it's high! There's brains and blood in there-- my name's Robitza! Corsets can go to the devil-- and drawers along with them! What do I care!
My two boys? --they're keen! Let the rich lady care for them they'll beat the school or let them go to the gutter-- that ends trouble.
This house is empty isn't it? Then it's mine because I need it. Oh, I won't starve while there's the Bible to make them feed me.
Try to help me if you want trouble or leave me alone-- that ends trouble.
The county physician is a damned fool and you can go to hell!
You could have closed the door when you came in; do it when you go out. I'm tired.
This is not a little sermon on slums. It conveys more than two dozen or two hundred magazine stories about the comedy of slum-work. As the memoir of a physician, it is keener than Spiess' notes of an advocate in the Genevan law courts. It is more compact than Vildrac's "Auberge," and has not Vildrac's tendency to sentiment. It is a poem that could be translated into French or any other modern language and hold its own with the contemporary product of whatever country one chose.
A DISTINCTION
A journalist has said to me: "We, i.e. we journalists, are like mediums. People go to a spiritist séance and hear what they want to hear. It is the same with a leading article: we write so that the reader will find what he wants to find."
That is the root of the matter; there is good journalism and bad journalism, and journalism that "looks" like "literature" and literature etc....
But the root of the difference is that in journalism the reader finds what he is looking for, whereas in literature he must find at least _a part of_ what the author intended.
That is why "the first impression of a work of genius" is "nearly always disagreeable." The public loathe the violence done to their self-conceit whenever any one conveys to them an idea that is his, not their own.
This difference is lasting and profound. Even in the vaguest of poetry, or the vaguest music, where the receiver may, or must make half the beauty he is to receive, there is always something of the author or composer which must be transmitted.
In journalism or the "bad art," there is no such strain on the public.
THE CLASSICS "ESCAPE"
It is well that the citizen should be acquainted with the laws of his country. In earlier times the laws of a nation were graven upon tablets and set up in the market place. I myself have seen a sign: "Bohemians are not permitted within the precincts of this commune"; but the laws of a great republic are too complex and arcane to permit of this simple treatment. I confess to having been a bad citizen, to just the extent of having been ignorant that at any moment my works might be classed in law's eye with the inventions of the late Dr. Condom.
It is possible that others with only a mild interest in literature may be equally ignorant; I quote therefore the law:
Section 211 of the United States Criminal Code provides:
"Every obscene, lewd, or lascivious, and every filthy book, pamphlet, picture, paper, letter, writing, print, or other publication of an indecent character and every article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for preventing conception or producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral use; and every article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing which is advertised or described in a manner calculated to lead another to use or apply it for preventing conception or producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral purpose; and every written or printed card, letter, circular, book, pamphlet, advertisement, or notice of any kind giving information directly or indirectly, where, or how, or from whom, or by what means any of the hereinbeforementioned matters, articles, or things may be obtained or made, or where or by whom any act or operation of any kind for the procuring or producing of abortion will be done or performed, or how or by what means conception may be prevented or abortion produced, whether sealed or unsealed; and every letter, packet, or package, or other mail matter containing any filthy, vile or indecent thing, device, or substance; any and every paper, writing, advertisement, or representation that any article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing may, or can, be used or applied for preventing conception or producing abortion or for any indecent or immoral purpose; and every description calculated to induce or incite a person to so use or apply any such article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing, is hereby declared to be non-mailable matter and shall not be conveyed in the mails or delivered from any post-office or by any letter carrier. Whoever shall knowingly deposit, or cause to be deposited for mailing or delivery, anything declared by this section to be non-mailable, or shall knowingly take, or cause the same to be taken, from the mails for the purpose of circulating or disposing thereof, or of aiding in the circulation or disposition thereof, shall be fined not more than five thousand dollars, or imprisoned not more than five years, or both."
It is well that the citizens of a country should be aware of its laws.
It is not for me to promulgate obiter dicta; to say that whatever the cloudiness of its phrasing, this law was obviously designed to prevent the circulation of immoral advertisements, propaganda for secret cures, and slips of paper that are part of the bawdy house business; that it was not designed to prevent the mailing of Dante, Villon, and Catullus. Whatever the subjective attitude of the framers of this legislation, we have fortunately a decision from a learned judge to guide us in its working.
"I have little doubt that numerous really great writings would come under the ban if tests that are frequently current were applied, and these approved publications doubtless at times escape only because they come within the term "classics," which means, for the purpose of the application of the statute, that they are ordinarily immune from interference, because they have the sanction of age and fame and USUALLY APPEAL TO A COMPARATIVELY LIMITED NUMBER OF READERS."
The capitals are my own.
The gentle reader will picture to himself the state of America IF the classics were widely read; IF these books which in the beginning lifted mankind from savagery, and which from A.D. 1400 onward have gradually redeemed us from the darkness of medievalism, should be read by the millions who now consume Mr. Hearst and the _Ladies' Home Journal!!!!!!_
Also there are to be no additions. No living man is to contribute or to attempt to contribute to the classics. Obviously even though he acquire fame before publishing, he can not have the sanction of "age."
Our literature does not fall under an inquisition; it does not bow to an index arranged by a council. It is subject to the taste of one individual.
Our hundred and twenty millions of inhabitants desire their literature sifted for them by one individual selected without any examination of his literary qualificatons.
I can not write of this thing in heat. It is a far too serious matter.
The classics "escape." They are "immune" "ordinarily." I can but close with the cadences of that blessed Little Brother of Christ, San Francesco d'Assisi:
CANTICO DEL SOLE
The thought of what America would be like If the classics had a wide circulation Troubles my sleep, The thought of what America, The thought of what America, The thought of what America would be like If the classics had a wide circulation Troubles my sleep, Nunc dimittis, Now lettest thou thy servant, Now lettest thou thy servant Depart in peace. The thought of what America, The thought of what America, The thought of what America would be like If the classics had a wide circulation.... Oh well! It troubles my sleep.
_Oravimus_
[1] _Prufrock and Other Observations_, by T.S. Eliot. _The Egoist_, London. Essay first published in _Poetry_, 1917.
[2] A.D. 1917.
[3] _The Future_, May, 1918.
[4] "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man." Egoist, Ltd. London. Huebsch, New York.
[5] Little Review.
[6] Egoist, Ltd., 23, Adelphi Terrace House, Robert Street, W.C. 2. _6s_. net. Knopf, New York, $1.50. Reviewed in _The Future._
[7] "Eminent Victorians," by Lytton Strachey.
[8] From "Prufrock." By T.S. Eliot. Egoist, Ltd.
PART SECOND
V
OUR TETRARCHAL PRÉCIEUSE
(A divagation from Jules Laforgue)
There arose, as from a great ossified sponge, the comic-opera, Florence-Nightingale light-house, with junks beneath it clicking in vesperal meretricious monotony; behind them the great cliff obtruded solitary into the oily, poluphloisbious ocean, lifting its confection of pylons; the poplar rows, sunk yards, Luna Parks, etc., of the Tetrarchal Palace polished jasper and basalt, funereal undertakerial, lugubrious, blistering in the highlights under a pale esoteric sun-beat; encrusted, bespattered and damascened with cynocephali, sphinxes, winged bulls, bulbuls, and other sculptural by-laws. The screech-owls from the jungle could only look out upon the shadowed parts of the sea, which they did without optic inconvenience, so deep was the obscured contagion of their afforested blackness.
The two extraneous princes went up toward the stable-yard, gaped at the effulgence of peacocks, glared at the derisive gestures of the horse-cleaners, adumbrated insults, sought vainly for a footman or any one to take up their cards.
The tetrarch appeared on a terrace, removing his ceremonial gloves.
The water, sprinkled in the streets in anticipation of the day's parade, dried in little circles of dust. The tetrarch puffed at his hookah with an exaggeration of dignity; he was disturbed at the presence of princes, he was disturbed by the presence of Jao; he desired to observe his own ruin, the slow deliquescence of his position, with a fitting detachment and lassitude. Jao had distributed pamphlets, the language was incomprehensible; Jao had been stored in the cellarage, his following distributed pamphlets.
In the twentieth century of his era the house of Emeraud Archytypas was about to have its prize bit of fireworks: a war with the other world ... after so many ages of purely esoteric culture!
Jao had declined both the poisoned coffee and the sacred sword of the Samurai, courtesies offered, in this case, to an incomprehensible foreigner. Even now, with a superlation of form, the sacred kriss had been sent to the court executioner, it was no mere every-day implement. The princes arrived at this juncture. There sounded from the back alleys the preparatory chirping of choral societies, and the wailing of pink-lemonade sellers. To-morrow the galley would be gone.
Leaning over the syrupy clematis, Emeraud crumbled brioches for the fishes, reminding himself that he had not yet collected the remains of his wits. There was no galvanization known to art, science, industry or the ministrations of sister-souls that would rouse his long since respectable carcass.
Yet at his birth a great tempest had burst above the dynastic manor; credible persons had noticed the lightnings scrolling Alpha and Omega above it; and nothing had happened. He had given up flagellation. He walked daily to the family necropolis: a cool place in the summer. He summoned the Arranger of Inanities.
II
Strapped, pomaded, gloved, laced; with patulous beards, with their hair parted at the backs of their heads; with their cork-screw curls pulled back from their foreheads to give themselves tone on their medallions; with helmets against one hip; twirling the musk-balls of their sabres with their disengaged restless fingers, the hyperborean royalties were admitted. And the great people received them, in due order: chief mandarins in clump, the librarian of the palace (Conde de las Navas), the Arbiter Elegantium, the Curator major of Symbols, the Examiner of the High Schools, the Supernumerary priest of the Snow Cult, the Administrator of Death, and the Chief Attendant Collector of Death-duties.
Their Highnesses bowed and addressed the Tetrarch: "... felicitous wind ... day so excessively glorious ... wafted ... these isles ... notwithstanding not also whereof ... basilica far exceeding ... Ind, Ormus ... Miltonesco ... etc. ... to say nothing of the seven-stopped barbary organ and the Tedium laudamus ... etc. ..."
(Lunch was brought in.)
Kallipagous artichokes, a light collation of tunny-fish, asparagus served on pink reeds, eels pearl-gray and dove-gray, gamut and series of compôtes and various wines (without alcohol).
Under impulsion of the Arranger of Inanities the pomaded princes next began their inspection of the buildings. A pneumatic lift hove them upward to the outer rooms of Salome's suite. The lift door clicked on its gilt-brass double expansion-clamps; the procession advanced between rows of wall-facing negresses whose naked shoulder-blades shone like a bronze of oily opacity. They entered the hall of majolica, very yellow with thick blue incrustations, glazed images, with flushed and protuberant faces; in the third atrium they came upon a basin of joined ivory, a white bath-sponge, rather large, a pair of very pink slippers. The next room was littered with books bound in white vellum and pink satin; the next with mathematical instruments, hydrostats, sextants, astrolabial discs, the model of a gasolene motor, a nickel-plated donkey engine.... They proceeded up metal stairs to the balcony, from which a rustling and swaying and melodiously enmousselined figure, jonquil-colored and delicate, preceded or rather predescended them by dumb-waiter, a route which they were not ready to follow. The machine worked for five floors: usage private and not ceremonial.
The pomaded princes stood to attention, bowed with deference and with gallantry. The Arranger ignored the whole incident, ascended the next flight of stairs and began on the telescope:
"Grand equatorial, 22 yards inner tube length, revocable cupola (frescoes in water-tight paint) weight 200,089 kilos, circulating on fourteen steel castors in a groove of chloride of magnesium, 2 minutes for complete revolution. The princess can turn it herself."
The princes allowed their attention to wander, they noted their ship beneath in the harbor, and calculated the drop, they then compared themselves with the brocaded and depilated denizens of the escort, after which they felt safer. They were led passively into the Small Hall of Perfumes, presented with protochlorine of mercury, bismuth regenerators, cantharides, lustral waters guaranteed free from hydrated lead. Were conducted thence to the hanging garden, where the form hermetically enmousselined, the jonquil-colored gauze with the pea-sized dark spots on it, disappeared from the opposite slope. Molossian hounds yapping and romping about her.
The trees lifted their skinned-salmon trunks, the heavy blackness was broken with a steely, metallic sunshine. A sea wind purred through the elongated forest like an express-train in a tunnel. Polychrome statues obtruded themselves from odd corners. An elephant swayed absentmindedly, the zoo was loose all over the place. The keeper of the aquarium moralized for an hour upon the calm life of his fishes. From beneath the dark tanks the hareem sent up a decomposed odor, and a melancholy slave chantey saturated the corridors, a low droning osmosis. They advanced to the cemetery, wanting all the time to see Jao.
This exhibit came at last in its turn. They were let down in a sling-rope through a musty nitrated grill, observing in this descent the ill-starred European in his bath-robe, his nose in a great fatras of papers over-scrawled with illegible pot-hooks.
He rose at their hefty salutation; readjusted his spectacles, blinked; and then it came over him: These damn pustulent princes! Here! and at last! Memory overwhelmed him. How many, on how many rotten December and November evenings had he stopped, had he not stopped in the drizzle, in the front line of workmen, his nose crushed against a policeman, and craning his scraggy neck to see _them_ getting out of their state barouche, going up the interminable front stairway to the big-windowed rococo palace; he muttering that the "Times" were at hand.
And now the revolution was accomplished. The proletariat had deputed them. They were here to howk him out of quod; a magnificent action, a grace of royal humility, performed at the will of the people, the new era had come into being. He saluted them automatically, searching for some phrase European, historic, fraternal, of course, but still noble.
The Royal Nephew, an oldish military man with a bald-spot, ubiquitarian humorist, joking with every one in season and out (like Napoleon), hating all doctrinaires (like Napoleon), was however the first to break silence: "Huk, heh, old sour bean, bastard of Jean Jacques Rousseau, is _this_ where you've come to be hanged? Eh? l'm damned if it ain't a good thing."
The unfortunate publicist stiffened.
"Idealogue!" said the Nephew.
The general strike had been unsuccessful. Jao bent with emotion. Tears showed in his watery eyes, slid down his worn cheek, trickled into his scraggy beard. There was then a sudden change in his attitude. He began to murmur caresses in the gentlest of European diminutives.
They started. There was a tinkle of keys, and through a small opposite doorway they discerned the last flash of the mousseline, the pale, jonquil-colored, blackspotted.
The Nephew readjusted his collar. A subdued cortège reascended.
III
The ivory orchestra lost itself in gay fatalistic improvisation; the opulence of two hundred over-fed tetrarchal Dining-Companions swished in the Evening salon, and overflowed coruscated couches. They slithered through their genuflections to the throne. The princes puffed out their elbows, simultaneously attempting to disentangle their Collars-of-the-Fleece in the idea that these would be a suitable present for their entertainer. Neither succeeded; suddenly in the midst of the so elaborate setting they perceived the æsthetic nullity of the ornament, its connotations were too complex to go into.
The tetrarchal children (superb productions, in the strictly esoteric sense) were led in over the jonquil-colored reed-matting. A water-jet shot up from the centre of the great table, and fell plashing above on the red and white rubber awning. A worn entertainment beset the diminutive music-hall stage: acrobats, flower-dancers, contortionists, comic wrestlers, to save the guests conversation. A trick skater was brought in on real ice, did the split, engraved a gothic cathedral. The Virgin Serpent as she was called, entered singing "Biblis, Biblis"; she was followed by a symbolic Mask of the Graces; which gave place to trapeze virtuosi.
An horizontal geyser of petals was shot over the auditorium. The hookahs were brought in. Jao presumably heard all this over his head. The diners' talk became general, the princes supporting the army, authority, religion a bulwark of the state, international arbitration, the perfectibility of the race; the mandarins of the palace held for the neutralization of contacts, initiated cénacles, frugality and segregation.
The music alone carried on the esoteric undertone, silence spread with great feathers, poised hawk-wise. Salome appeared on the high landing, descended the twisted stair, still stiff in her sheath of mousseline; a small ebony lyre dangled by a gilt cord from her wrist; she nodded to her parent; paused before the Alcazar curtain, balancing, swaying on her anæmic pigeon-toed little feet--until every one had had a good look at her. She looked at no one in particular; her hair dusty with exiguous pollens curled down over her narrow shoulders, ruffled over her forehead, with stems of yellow flowers twisted into it. From the dorsal joist of her bodice, from a sort of pearl matrix socket there rose a peacock tail, moire, azure, glittering with shot emerald: an halo for her marble-white face.
Superior, graciously careless, conscious of her uniqueness, of her autochthonous entity, her head cocked to the left, her eyes fermented with the interplay of contradictory expiations, her lips a pale circonflex, her teeth with still paler gums showing their super-crucified half-smile. An exquisite recluse, formed in the island æsthetic, there alone comprehended. Hermetically enmousselined, the black spots in the fabric appeared so many punctures in the soft brightness of her sheath. Her arms of angelic nudity, the two breasts like two minute almonds, the scarf twined just above the adorable umbilical groove (nature desires that nude woman should be adorned with a girdle) composed in a cup-shaped embrace of the hips. Behind her the peacock halo, her pale pigeon-toed feet covered only by the watered-yellow fringe and by the bright-yellow anklet. She balanced, a little budding messiah; her head over-weighted; not knowing what to do with her hands; her petticoat so simple, art long, very long, and life so very inextensive; so obviously ready for the cosy-corner, for little talks in conservatories....
And she was going to speak....
The Tetrarch bulged in his cushions, as if she had already said something. His attention compelled that of the princes; he brushed aside the purveyor of pine-apples.
She cleared her throat, laughing, as if not to be taken too seriously; the sexless, timbreless voicelet, like that of a sick child asking for medicine, began to the lyre accompaniment:
"Canaan, excellent nothingness; nothingness-latent, circumambient, about to be the day after to-morrow, incipient, estimable, absolving, coexistent...."
The princes were puzzled. "Concessions by the five senses to an all-inscribing affective insanity; latitudes, altitudes, nebulæ, Medusæ of gentle water, affinities of the ineradicable, passages over earth so eminently identical with incalculably numerous duplicates, alone in indefinite infinite. Do you take me? I mean that the pragmatic essence attracted self-ward dynamically but more or less in its own volition, whistling in the bag-pipes of the soul without termination.--But to be natural passives, to enter into the cosmos of harmonics.--Hydrocephalic theosophies, act it, aromas of populace, phenomena without stable order, contaminated with prudence.--Fatal Jordans, abysmal Ganges--to an end with 'em--insubmersible sidereal currents--nurse-maid cosmogonies."
She pushed back her hair dusty with pollens, the soft handclapping began; her eyelids drooped slightly, her faintly-suggested breasts lifted slightly, showed more rosy through the almond-shaped eyelets of her corsage. She was still fingering the ebony lyre.
"Bis, bis, brava!" cried her audience.
Still she waited.
"Go on! You shall have whatever you like. Go on, my dear," said the Tetrarch; "we are all so damned bored. Go on, Salome, you shall have any blamed thing you like: the Great-Seal, the priesthood of the Snow Cult, a job in the University, even to half of my oil stock. But inoculate us with ... eh ... with the gracious salve of this cosmoconception, with this parthenospotlessness."
The company in his wake exhaled an inedited boredom. They were all afraid of each other. Tiaras nodded, but no one confessed to any difficulty in following the thread of her argument. They were, racially, so very correct.
Salome wound on in summary rejection of theogonies, theodicies, comparative wisdoms of nations (short shift, tone of recitative). Nothing for nothing, perhaps one measure of nothing. She continued her mystic loquacity: "O tides, lunar oboes, avenues, lawns of twilight, winds losing caste in November, haymakings, vocations manquées, expressions of animals, chances."
Jonquil colored mousselines with black spots, eyes fermented, smiles crucified, adorable umbilici, peacock aureoles, fallen carnations, inconsequent fugues. One felt reborn, reinitiate and rejuvenate, the soul expiring systematically in spirals across indubitable definitive showers, for the good of earth, understood everywhere, palp of Varuna, air omniversal, assured if one were but ready.
Salome continued insistently: "The pure state, I tell you, sectaries of the consciousness, why this convention of separations, individuals by mere etiquette, indivisible? Breathe upon the thistle-down of these sciences, as you call them, in the orient of my pole-star. Is it life to persist in putting oneself au courant with oneself, constantly to inspect oneself, and then query at each step: am I wrong? Species! Categories! and kingdoms, bah!! Nothing is lost, nothing added, it is all reclaimed in advance. There is no ticket to the confessional for the heir of the prodigies. Not expedients and expiations, but vintages of the infinite, not experimental but in fatality."
The little yellow vocalist with the black funereal spots broke the lyre over her knee, and regained her dignity. The intoxicated crowd mopped their foreheads. An embarassing silence. The hyperboreans looked at each other: "What time will they put her to bed?" But neither ventured articulation; they did not even inspect their watches. It couldn't have been later than six. The slender voice once more aroused them:
"And now, father, I wish you to send me the head of Jao Kanan, on any saucer you like. I am going upstairs. I expect it."
"But ... but ... my dear ... this ... this...." However--the hall was vigorously of the opinion that the Tiara should accomplish the will of Salome.
Emeraud glanced at the princes, who gave sign neither of approbation nor of disapprobation. The cage-birds again began shrieking. The matter was none of their business.
Decide!
The Tetrarch threw his seal to the Administrator of Death. The guests were already up, changing the conversation on their way to the evening tepidarium.
IV
With her elbows on the observatory railing, Salome, disliking popular fêtes, listened to her familiar poluphloisbious ocean. Calm evening.
Stars out in full company, eternities of zeniths of embers. Why go into exile?
Salome, milk-sister to the Via Lactea, seldom lost herself in constellations. Thanks to photo-spectrum analysis the stars could be classified as to color and magnitudes; she had commanded a set of diamonds in the proportionate sizes to adorn nocturnally her hair and her person, over mousseline of deep mourning-violet with gold dots in the surface. Stars below the sixteenth magnitude were not, were not in her world, she envisaged her twenty-four millions of subjects.
Isolated nebulous matrices, not the formed nebulæ, were her passion; she ruled out planetiform discs and sought but the unformed, perforated, tentacular. Orion's gaseous fog was the Brother Benjamin of her galaxy. But she was no more the "little" Salome, this night brought a change of relations, exorcised from her virginity of tissue she felt peer to these matrices, fecund as they in gyratory evolutions. Yet this fatal sacrifice to the cult (still happy in getting out of so discreetly) had obliged her in order to get rid of her initiator, to undertake a step (grave perhaps), perhaps homicide;--finally to assure silence, cool water to contingent people,--elixir of an hundred nights' distillation. It must serve.
Ah, well, such was her life. She was a specialty, a minute specialité.
There on a cushion among the débris of her black ebony lyre, lay Jao's head, like Orpheus' head in the old days, gleaming, encrusted with phosphorus, washed, anointed, barbered, grinning at the 24 million stars.
As soon as she had got it, Salome, inspired by the true spirit of research, had commenced the renowned experiments after decollation; of which we have heard so much. She awaited. The electric passes of her hypnotic manual brought from it nothing but inconsequential grimaces.
She had an idea, however.
She perhaps lowered her eyes, out of respect to Orion, stiffening herself to gaze upon the nebulæ of her puberties ... for ten minutes. What nights, what nights in the future! Who will have the last word about it? Choral societies, fire-crackers down there in the city.
Finally Salome shook herself, like a sensible person, reset, readjusted her fichu, took off the gray gold-spotted symbol-jewel of Orion, placed it between Jao's lips as an host, kissed the lips pityingly and hermetically, sealed them with corrosive wax (a very speedy procedure).
Then with a "Bah!" mutinous, disappointed, she seized the genial boko of the late Jao Kanan, in delicate feminine hands.
As she wished the head to land plumb in the sea without bounding upon the cliffs, she gave a good swing in turning. The fragment described a sufficient and phosphorescent parabola, a noble parabola. But unfortunately the little astronomer had terribly miscalculated her impetus, and tripping over the parapet with a cry finally human she hurtled from crag to crag, to fall, shattered, into the picturesque anfractuosities of the breakers, far from the noise of the national festival, lacerated and naked, her skull shivered, paralyzed with a vertigo, in short, gone to the bad, to suffer for nearly an hour.
She had not even the viaticum of seeing the phosphorescent star, the floating head of Jao on the water. And the heights of heaven were distant.
* * * * *
Thus died Salome of the Isles (of the White Esoteric Isles, in especial) less from uncultured misventure than from trying to fabricate some distinction between herself and every one else; like the rest of us.
VI
GENESIS, OR, THE FIRST BOOK IN THE BIBLE[1]
("SUBJECT TO AUTHORITY")
The sacred author of this work, Genesis, complied with the ideas acceptable to his era; it was almost necessary; for without this condescension he would not have been understood. There remain for us merely a few reflections on the physics of those remote times. As for the theology of the book: we respect it, we believe it most firmly, we would not risk the faintest touch to its surface.
"In the beginning God created heaven and earth." That is the way they translate it, yet there is scarcely any one so ignorant as not to know that the original reads "the gods created heaven and earth"; which reading conforms to the Phœnician idea that God employed lesser divinities to untangle chaos. The Phœnicians had been long established when the Hebrews broke into some few provinces of their land. It was quite natural that these latter should have learned their language and borrowed their ideas of the cosmos.
Did the ancient Phœnician philosophers in "the time of Moses" know enough to regard the earth as a point in relation to the multitude of globes which God has placed in immensity? The very ancient and false idea that heaven was made for the earth has nearly always prevailed among ignorant peoples. It is scarcely possible that such good navigators as the Phœnicians should not have had a few decent astronomers, but the old prejudices were quite strong, and were gently handled by the author of Genesis, who wrote to teach us God's ways and not to instruct us in physics.
"The earth was all _tohu bohu_ and void, darkness was over the face of the deep, the spirit of God was borne on the waters."
"Tohu bohu" means precisely chaos, disorder. The earth was not yet formed as it is at present. Matter existed, the divine power had only to straighten things out. The "spirit of God" is literally the "breath" or "wind" which stirred up the waters. This idea is found in fragments of the Phœnician author, Sanchoniathon. The Phœnicians, like all the other peoples of antiquity, believed matter eternal. There is not one author of all those times who ever said that one could make something of nothing. Even in the Bible there is no passage which claims that matter was made out of nothing, not but what this creation from nothing is true, but its verity was unknown to the carnal Jews.
Men have been always divided on the eternity of the world, but never on the eternity of matter.
"_Gigni de nihilo nihilum, et in nihilum nil posse reverti,"_ writes Persius, and all antiquity shared his opinion. God said, "Let there be light," and there was light, and he saw that the light was good, and he divided the light from darkness, and he called the light _day_ and the darkness _night_, and this was the evening and the morning of the first day. And God also said that the firmament, etc., the second day ... saw that it was good.
Let us begin by seeing whether the bishop of Avranches Huet, Leclerc, etc., are right, against those who claim that this is a sublime piece of eloquence.
* * * * *
The Jewish author lumps in the light with the other objects of creation; he uses the same turn of phrase, "saw that it was good." The sublime should lift itself above the average. Light is no better treated than anything else in this passage. It was another respected opinion that light did not come from the sun. Men saw it spread through the air before sunrise and after sunset; they thought the sun served merely to reinforce it. The author of Genesis conforms to popular error: he has the sun and moon made four days after the light. It is unlikely that there was a morning and evening before the sun came into being, but the inspired author bows to the vague and stupid prejudice of his nation. It seems probable that God was not attempting to educate the Jews in philosophy or cosmogony. He could lift their spirits straight into truth, _but_ he _preferred_ to descend to their level. One can not repeat this answer too often.
The separation of the light from the darkness is not part of another physical theory; it seems that night and day were mixed up like two kinds of grain; and that they were sifted out of each other. It is sufficiently well established that darkness is nothing but the deprivation of light, and that there is light only in so far as our eyes receive the sensation, but no one had thought of this at that time.
The idea of the firmament is also of respectable antiquity. People imagined the skies very solid, because the same set of things always happened there. The skies circulated over our heads, they must therefore be very strong. The means of calculating how many exhalations of the earth and how many seas would be needed to keep the clouds full of water? There was then no Halley to write out the equations. There were tanks of water in heaven. These tanks were held up on a good steady dome; but one could see through the dome; it must have been made out of crystal. In order that the water could be poured over the earth there had to be doors, sluices, cataracts which could be opened, turned on. Such was the current astronomy, _and_ one was writing for Jews; it was quite necessary to take up their silly ideas, which they had borrowed from other peoples only a little less stupid.
"God made two great lights, one to preside over the day, the other the night, and he made also the stars."
True, this shows the same continuous ignorance of nature. The Jews did not know that the moonlight is merely reflection. The author speaks of the stars as luminous points, which they look like, although they are at times suns with planets swinging about them. But holy spirit harmonized with the mind of the time. If he had said that the sun is a million times as large as the earth, and the moon fifty times smaller, no one would have understood him. They appear to be two stars of sizes not very unequal.
"God said also: let us make man in our image, let him rule over the fishes, etc."
What did the Jews mean by "in our image"? They meant, like all antiquity:
_Finxit in effigiem moderantum cuncta deorum._
One can not make "images" save of bodies. No nation then imagined a bodiless god, and it is impossible to picture him as such. One might indeed say "god is nothing of anything we know," but then one would not have any idea what he is. The Jews constantly believed god corporal, as did all the rest of the nations. All the first fathers of the church also believed god corporal, until they had swallowed Plato's ideas, or rather until the lights of Christianity had grown purer.
"He created them male and female."
If God or the secondary gods created man male and female in their resemblance, it would seem that the Jews believed God and the Gods were male and female. One searches to see whether the author meant to say that man was at the start ambisextrous or if he means that God made Adam and Eve the same day. The most natural interpretation would be that god made Adam and Eve at the same time, but this is absolutely contradicted by the formation of woman from the rib, a long time after the first seven days.
"And he rested the seventh day."
The Phœnicians, Chaldeans, and Indians say that God made the world in six periods, which Zoroaster calls the six gahambars, as celebrated among Persians.
It is incontestable that all these people had a theogony long before the Jews got to Horeb and Sinai, and before they could have had writers. Several savants think it likely that the allegory of the six days is imitated from the six periods. God might have permitted great nations to have this idea before he inspired the Jews, just as he had permitted other people to discover the arts before the Jews had attained any.
"The place of delight shall be a river which waters a garden, and from it shall flow four rivers, Phison ... Gehon..., etc., Tigris, Euphrates...."
According to this version the terrestrial paradise would have contained about a third of Asia and Africa. The Euphrates and Tigris have their sources sixty miles apart in hideous mountains which do not look the least like a garden. The river which borders Ethiopia can be only the Nile, whose source is a little over a thousand miles from those of the Tigris and the Euphrates; and if Phison is the Phase, it is curious to start a Scythian river from the fount of a river of Africa. One must look further afield for the meaning of all these rivers. Every commentator makes his own Eden.
Some one has said that the Garden was like the gardens of Eden at Saana in Arabia Felix celebrated in antiquity, and that the parvenu Hebrews might have been an Arab tribe taking to themselves credit for the prettiest thing in the best canton of Arabia, as they have always taken to themselves the traditions of all the great peoples who enslaved them. But in any case they were led by the Lord.
"The Lord took man and set him in the midst of the garden, to tend it." It was all very well saying "tend it," "cultivate the garden," but it would have been very difficult for Adam to cultivate a garden 3,000 miles long. Perhaps he had helpers. It is another chance for the commentators to exercise their gifts of divination ... as they do with the rivers.
"Eat not of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil." It is difficult to think that there was a tree which taught good and evil; as there are pear trees and peach trees. One asks why God did not wish man to know good from evil. Would not the opposite wish (if one dare say so) appear more worthy of God, and much more needful to man? It seems to our poor reason that God might have ordered him to eat a good deal of this fruit, but one must submit one's reason and conclude that obedience to God is the proper course for us.
"If you eat of the fruit you shall die."
Yet Adam ate, and did not die in the least; they say he lived another nine centuries. Several "Fathers" have considered all this as an allegory. Indeed, one may say that other animals do not know that they die, but that man knows it through his reason. This reason is the tree of knowledge which makes him foresee his finish. This explanation may be more reasonable, but we do not dare to pronounce on it.
"The Lord said also: It is not good that man should Le alone, let us make him an helpmate like to him." One expects that the Lord is going to give him a woman, but first he brings up all the beasts. This may be the transposition of some copyist.
"And the name which Adam gave to each animal is its real name." An animal's real name would be one which designated all the qualifications of its species, or at least the principal traits, but this does not exist in any language. There are certain imitative words, cock and cuckoo, and _alali_ in Greek, etc. Moreover, if Adam had known the real names and therefore the properties of the animals, he must have already eaten of the tree of knowledge; or else it would seem that God need not have forbidden him the tree, since he already knew more than the Royal Society, or the Academy.
Observe that this is the first time Adam is named in Genesis. The first man according to the Brahmins was Adimo, son of the earth. Adam and Eve mean the same thing in Phœnician, another indication that the holy spirit fell in with the received ideas.
"When Adam was asleep, etc.,... rib ... made a woman." The Lord, in the preceding chapter, had already created them male and female; why should he take a rib out of the man to make a woman already existing? We are told that the author announces in one place what he explains in another. We are told that this allegory shows woman submitted to her husband. Many people have believed on the strength of these verses that men have one rib less than women, but this is an heresy and anatomy shows us that a woman is no better provided with ribs than her husband.
"Now the serpent was the most subtle of beasts," etc., "he said to the woman," etc.
There is nowhere the least mention of the devil or a devil. All is physical. The serpent was considered not only the subtlest of all beasts by all oriental nations; he was also believed immortal. The Chaldeans had a fable about a fight between God and a serpent; it is preserved by Pherecides. Origen cites it in his sixth book against Celsus. They carried snakes in the feasts of Bacchus. The Egyptians attributed a sort of divinity to the serpent, as Eusebius tells us in his "Evangelical Preparations," book I, chapter X. In India and Arabia, and in China, the serpent was the symbol of life; the Chinese emperors before Moses wore the serpent sign on their breasts.
Eve is not surprised at the serpent's talking to her. Animals are always talking in the old stories; thus when Pilpai and Locman make animals talk no one is ever surprised.
All this tale seems physical and denuded of allegory. It even tells us the reason why the serpent who ramped before this now crawls on its belly, and why we always try to destroy it (at least so they say); precisely as we are told in all ancient metamorphoses why the crow, who was white, is now black, why the owl stays at home in the daytime, etc. But the "Fathers" have believed it an allegory manifest and respectable, and it is safest to believe them.
"I will multiply your griefs and your pregnancies, ye shall bring forth children with grief, ye shall be beneath the power of the man and he shall rule over you." One asks why the multiplication of pregnancies is a punishment. It was on the contrary a very great blessing, and especially for the Jews. The pains of childbirth are alarming only for delicate women; those accustomed to work are brought to bed very easily, especially in hot climates. On the other hand, animals sometimes suffer in littering, and even die of it. As for the superiority of man over woman, this is the quite natural result of his bodily and intellectual forces. The male organs are generally more capable of consecutive effort, more fit for manual and intellectual tasks. But when the woman has fist or wit stronger than those of her husband she rules the roost, and the man is submitted to woman. This is true, _but_ before the original sin there may have been neither pain nor submission.
"God made them tunics of skin."
This passage proves very nicely that the Jews believed in a corporal god. A Rabbi named Eliezer has written that God covered Adam and Eve with the skin of the tempter serpent; Origen claims that the "tunic of skin" was a new flesh, a new body which God made for man, but one should have more respect for the text:
"And the Lord said 'Behold Adam, who is become like one of us.'" It seems that the Jews at first admired several gods. It is considerably more difficult to make out what they mean by the word God, _Eloim_. Several commentators state that this phrase, "one of us," means the Trinity, but there is no question of the Trinity in the Bible.[2]
The Trinity is not a composite of several gods, it is the same god tripled; the Jews never heard tell of a god in three persons. By these words "like unto us" it is probible that the Jews meant angels, Eloïm. For this reason various rash men of learning have thought that the book was not written until a time when the Jews had adopted a belief in inferior gods, but this view is condemned.[3]
"The Lord set him outside the garden of delights, that he might dig in the earth." Yet some say that God had put him in the garden, in order that he might cultivate _it._ If gardener Adam merely became laborer Adam, he was not so much the worse off. This solution of the difficulty does not seem to us sufficiently serious. It would be better to say that God punished Adam's disobedience by banishing him from his birthplace.
Certain over-temerarious commentators say that the whole of the story refers to an idea once common to all men, i.e., that past times were better than present. People have always bragged of the past in order to run down the present. Men overburdened with work have imagined that pleasure is idleness, not having had wit enough to conceive that man is never worse off than when he has nothing to do. Men seeing themselves not infrequently miserable forged an idea of a time when all men were happy. It is as if they had said, once upon a time no tree withered, no beast fell sick, no animal devoured another, the spiders did not catch flies. Hence the ideal of the Golden Age, of the egg of Arimana, of the serpent who stole the secret of eternal life from the donkey, of the combat of Typhon and Osiris, of Ophionée and the gods, of Pandora's casket, and all these other old stories, sometimes very ingenious and never, in the least way, instructive. _But_ we should believe that the fables of other nations are imitation of Hebrew history, since we still have the Hebrew history and the history of other savage peoples is for the most part destroyed. Moreover, the witnesses in favor of Genesis are quite irrefutable.
"And he set before the garden of delight a chérubin with a turning and flaming sword to keep guard over the gateway to the tree of life." The word "kerub" means bullock. A bullock with a burning sword is an odd sight at a doorway. But the Jews have represented angels as bulls and as sparrow hawks, despite the prohibition to make graven images. Obviously they got these bulls and hawks from Egyptians who imitated all sorts of things, and who worshipped the bull as the symbol of agriculture and the hawk as the symbol of winds. Probably the tale is an allegory, a Jewish allegory, the kerub means "nature." A symbol made of a bull's body, a man's head and a hawk's wings.
"The Lord put his mark upon Cain."
"What a Lord!" say the incredulous. He accepts Abel's offering, rejects that of the elder brother, without giving any trace of a reason. The Lord provided the cause of the first brotherly enmity. This is a moral instruction, most truly, a lesson to be learned from all ancient fables, to wit, that scarcely had the race come into existence before one brother assassinated another, but what appears to the wise of this world, contrary to all justice, contrary to all the common sense principles, is that God has eternally damned the whole human race, and has slaughtered his own son, quite uselessly, for an apple, and that he has pardoned a fratricide. Did I say "pardoned"? He takes the criminal under his own protection. He declares that any one who avenges the murder of Abel shall be punished with seven fold the punishment inflicted on Cain. He puts on him his sign as a safeguard. The impious call the story both execrable and absurd. It is the delirium of some unfortunate Israelite, who wrote these inept infamies in imitation of stories so abundant among the neighboring Syrians. This insensate Hebrew attributed his atrocious invention to Moses, at a time when nothing was rarer than books. Destiny, which disposes of all things, has preserved his work till our day; scoundrels have praised it, and idiots have believed. Thus say the horde of theists, who while adoring God, have been so rash as to condemn the Lord God of Israel, and who judge the
## actions of the Eternal Being by the rules of our imperfect ethics, and
our erroneous justice. They admit a god but submit god to our laws. Let us guard against such temerity, and let us once again learn to respect what lies beyond our comprehension. Let us cry out "O Altitudo!" with all our strength.
"The Gods, Eloïm, seeing that the daughters of men were fair, took for spouses those whom they chose." This flight of imagination is also common to all the nations. There is no race, except perhaps the Chinese,[4] which has not recorded gods getting young girls with child. Corporeal gods come down to look at their domain, they see our young ladies and take the best for themselves; children produced in this way are better than other folks' children; thus Genesis does not omit to say that this commerce bred giants. Once again the book is in key with vulgar opinion.
"And I will pour the water floods over the earth." I would note here that St. Augustin (City of God, No. 8) says, "_Maximum illud diluvium graeca nec latina novit historia_." Neither Greek nor Latin history takes note of this very great flood. In truth, they knew only Deucalion's and Ogyges' in Greece. These were regarded as universal in the fables collected by Ovid, but were totally unknown in Eastern Asia. St. Augustin is not in error when he says history makes no mention thereof.
"God said to Noah: I will make an agreement with you and with your seed after you, and with all the animals." God make an agreement with animals! The unbelievers will exclaim: "What a contract!" But if he make an alliance with man, why not with the animals? What nice feeling, there is something quite as divine in this sentiment as in the most metaphysical thought. Moreover, animals feel better than most men think. It is apparently in virtue of this agreement that St. Francis of Assisi, the founder of the seraphic order, said to the grasshoppers, and hares, "Sing, sister hoppergrass, brouse brother rabbit." But what were the terms of the treaty? That all the animals should devour each other; that they should live on our flesh; and we on theirs; that after having eaten all we can we should exterminate all the rest, and that we should only omit the devouring of men strangled with our own hands. If there was any such pact it was presumably made with the devil.
Probably this passage is only intended to show that God is in equal degree master of all things that breathe. This pact could only have been a command; it is called "alliance" merely by an "extension of the word's meaning." One should not quibble over mere terminology, but worship the spirit, and go back to the time when they wrote this work which is scandal to the weak, but quite edifying to the strong.
"And I will put my bow in the sky, and it shall be a sign of our pact." Note that the author does not say "I have put" but "I will put my bow"; this shows that in common opinion the bow had not always existed. It is a phenomenon of necessity caused by the rain, and they give it as a supernatural manifestation that the world shall never more be covered with water. It is odd that they should choose a sign of rain as a promise that one shall not be drowned. But one may reply to this: when in danger of inundations we may be reassured by seeing a rainbow.
"Now the Lord went down to see the city which the children of Adam had builded, and he said, behold a people with only one speech. They have begun this and won't quit until it is finished. Let us go down and confound their language, so that no man may understand his neighbor." Note merely that the sacred author still conforms to vulgar opinion. He always speaks of God as of a man who informs himself of what is going on, who wants to see with his eyes what is being done on his estate, and who calls his people together to determine a course of action.
"And Abraham, having arrayed his people (there were of them three hundred and eighteen), fell upon the five kings and slew them and pursued them even to Hoba on the left side of Damas." From the south side of the lake of Sodom to Damas is 24 leagues, and they still had to cross Liban and anti-Liban. Unbelievers exult over such tremendous exaggeration. But since the Lord favored Abraham there is _no_ exaggeration.
"And that evening two angels came into Sodom, etc." The history of the two angels whom the Sodomites wanted to ravish is perhaps the most extraordinary which antiquity has produced. But we must remember that all Asia believed in incubi and succubæ demons, and that moreover these angels were creatures more perfect than man, and that they were probably much better looking, and lit more desires in a jaded, corrupt race than common men would have excited. Perhaps this part of the story is only a figure of rhetoric to express the horrible lewdness of Sodom and of Gomorrah. We offer this solution to savants with the most profound self-mistrust.
As for Lot who offered his two daughters to the Sodomites in lieu of the angels, and Lot's wife metamorphosed into the saline image, and all the rest of the story, what can one say of it? The ancient fable of Cinyra and Myrrha has some relation to Lot's incest with his daughters, the adventure of Philemon and Baucis is not without its points of comparison with that of the two angels appearing to Lot and his wife. As for the pillar of salt, I do not know what it compares with, perhaps with the story of Orpheus and Eurydice?
A number of savants think with Newton and the learned Leclerc that the Pentateuch was written by Samuel when the Jews had learned reading and writing, md that all these tales are imitation of Syrian fable.
But it is sufficient for us that it is all Holy Scripture; we therefore revere it without searching in it for anything that is not the work of the Holy Spirit. We should remember, at all times, that these times are not our times, and we should not fail to add our word to that of so many great men who have declared that the Old Testament is true history, and that everything invented by all the rest of the universe is mere fable.
Some savants have pretended that one should remove from the canonical books all incredible matters which might be a stumbling block to the feeble, but it is said that these savants were men of corrupt heart and that they ought to be burned, and that it is impossible to be an honest man unless you believe that the Sodomites desired to ravish the angels. This is the reasoning of a species of monster who wishes to rule over wits.
It is true that several celebrated church fathers have had the prudence to turn all these tales into allegory, like the Jews, and Philo in especial. Popes still more prudent desired to prevent the translation of these books into the everyday tongue, for fear men should be led to pass judgment on what was upheld for their adoration.
One ought surely to conclude that those who perfectly understand this work should tolerate those who do not understand it, for if these latter do not understand it, it is not their fault; also those who do not understand it should tolerate those who understand it most fully.
Savants, too full of their knowledge, have claimed that Moses could not possibly have written the book of Genesis. One of their reasons is that in the story of Abraham, the patriarch pays for his wife's funeral plot in coined money, and that the king of Gerare gives a thousand pieces of silver to Sarah when he returns her, after having stolen her for her beauty in the seventy-fifth year of her age. They say that, having consulted authorities, they find that there was no coined money in those days. But it is quite clear that this is pure chicane on their part, since the Church has always believed most firmly that Moses did write the Pentateuch. They strengthen all the doubts raised by the disciples of Aben-Hesra and Baruch Spinoza. The physician Astruc, father-in-law of the comptroller-general Silhouette, in his book, now very rare, entitled "Conjectures on Genesis," adds new objections, unsolvable to human wisdom; but not to humble submissive piety. The savants dare to contradict every line, the simple revere every line. Guard against falling into the misfortune of trusting our human reason, be contrite in heart and in spirit.
"And Abraham said that Sarah was his sister, and the king of Gerare took her to him." We confess, as we have said in our essay on Abraham, that Sarah was then ninety years old; that she had already been kidnapped by one King of Egypt; and that a king of this same desert Gerare later kidnapped the wife of Abraham's son Isaac. We have also spoken of the servant Agar, by whom Abraham had a son, and of how Abraham treated them both. One knows what delight unbelievers take in these stories; with what supercilious smiles they consider them; how they set the story of Abimelech and this same wife of Abraham's (Sarah) whom he passed off as his sister, above the "1001 nights" and also that of another Abimelech in love with Rebecca, whom Isaac also passed off as his sister. One can not too often reiterate that the fault of all these studious critics lies in their persistent endeavour to bring all these things into accord with our feeble reason and to judge ancient Arabs as they would judge the French court or the English.
"The soul of Sichem, son of King Hemor, cleaved to the soul of Dinah, and he charmed his sadness with her tender caresses, and he went to Hemor his father, and said unto him: Give me this woman for wife." Here the savants are even more refractory. What! a king's son marry a vagabond's daughter, Jacob her father loaded with presents! The king receives into his city these wandering robbers, called patriarchs; he has the incredible and incomprehensible kindness to get himself circumcised, he and his son, his court and his people, in order to condescend to the superstition of this little tribe which did not own a half league of land! And what reward do our holy patriarchs make him for such astonishing kindness? They wait the day when the wound of circumcision ordinarily produces a fever. Then Simeon and Levi run throughout the city, daggers in hand; they massacre the king, the prince, his son, and all the inhabitants. The horror of this St. Bartholemew is only diminished by its impossibility. It is a shocking romance but it is obviously a ridiculous romance: It is impossible that two men could have killed a whole nation. One might suffer some inconvenience from one's excerpted foreskin, but one would defend oneself against two scoundrels, one would assemble, surround them, finish them off as they deserved.
But there is one more impossible statement: by an exact supputation of date, we find that Dinah, daughter of Jacob, was at this time no more than three years of age; even if one tries to accommodate the chronology, she could not have been more than five: it is this that causes complaint. People say: What sort of a book is this? The book of a reprobate people, a book for so long unknown to all the earth, a book where right, reason and decent custom are outraged on every page, and which we have presented us as irrefutable, holy, dictated by God himself? Is it not an impiety to believe it? Is it not the dementia of cannibals to persecute sensible, modest men who do not believe it?
To which we reply: The Church says she believes it. Copyists may have introduced revolting absurdities into reverend stories. Only the Holy Church can be judge of such matters. The profane should be led by her wisdom. These absurdities, these pretended horrors do not affect the basis of our religion. Where would men be if the cult of virtue depended on what happened long ago to Sichem and little Dinah?
"Behold the Kings who reigned in the land of Edom, before the children of Israel had a king."
Behold another famous passage, another stone which doth hinder our feet. It is this passage which determined the great Newton, the pious and sage Samuel Clarke, the deeply philosophical Bolingbroke, the learned Leclerc, the savant Frêret, and a great number of other scholars to argue that Moses could not have been the author of Genesis.
We do indeed confess that these words could only have been written at a time when the Jews had kings.
It is chiefly this verse which determined Astruc to upset the whole book of Genesis, and to hypothecate memories on which the real author had drawn. His work is ingenious, exact, but rash. A council would scarcely have dared to undertake it. And to what end has it served, this ungrateful, dangerous work of this Astruc? To redouble the darkness which he set out to enlighten. This is ever the fruit of that tree of knowledge whereof we all wish to eat. Why should it be necessary that the fruits of the tree of ignorance should be more nourishing and more easy to manage?
But what matter to us, after all, whether this verse, or this chapter, was written by Moses, or by Samuel or by the priest from Samaria, or by Esdras, or by any one else? In what way can our government, our laws, our fortunes, our morals, our well being, be tied up with the ignorant chiefs of an unfortunate barbarous country, called Edom or Idumea, always peopled by thieves? Alas, these poor shirtless Arabs never ask about our existence, they pillage caravans and eat barley bread, and we torment ourselves trying to find out whether there were kinglets in one canton of Arabia Petra before they appeared in the neighboring canton to the west of lake Sodom.
_O miseras hominium mentes! O pectora caeca!_[5]
[1] Translated from an eighteenth-century author.
[2] The reader will remember in Landor's Chinese dialogues, when the returned mandarin is telling the Emperor's children about England, there is one place where they burst into giggles "because they had been taught some arithmetic."
[3] The reader is referred to our heading: "Subject to authority".
[4] In Fenollosa's notes on Kutsugen's ode to "Sir in the Clouds," I am unable to make out whether the girl is more than a priestess. She bathes in hot water made fragrant by boiling orchids in it, she washes her hair and binds iris into it, she puts on the dress of flowery colors, and the god illimitable in his brilliance descends; she continues her attention to her toilet, in very reverent manner.
[5] Our author's treatment of Ezekiel merits equal attention.
VII
ARNAUT DANIEL
RAZO
En Ar. Daniel was of Ribeyrac in Perigord, under Lemosi, near to Hautefort, and he was the best fashioner of songs in the Provençal, as Dante has said of him in his Purgatorio (XXVI, 140), and Tasso says it was he wrote "Lancillotto," but this is not known for certain, but Dante says only "proze di romanzi." Nor is it known if Benvenuto da Imola speaks for certain when he says En Arnaut went in his age to a monastery and sent a poem to the princes, nor if he wrote a satire on Boniface Castillane; but here are some of his canzos, the best that are left us; and he was very cunning in his imitation of birds, as in the poem "Autet," where he stops in the middle of his singing, crying: "Cadahus, en son us," as a bird cries, and rhyming on it cleverly, with no room to turn about on the words, "Mas pel us, estauc clus," and in the other versets. And in "L'aura amara," he cries as the birds in the autumn, and there is some of this also in his best poem, "Doutz brais e critz."
And in "Breu brisaral," he imitates, maybe, the rough singing of the _joglar engles_, from whom he learnt "Ac et no l'ac"; and though some read this "escomes," not "_engles_," it is likely enough that in the court of En Richart there might have been an English joglar, for En Bertrans calls Richart's brother "joven re Engles," so why should there not be a joglar of the same, knowing alliterations? And he may, in the ending "piula," have had in mind some sort of Arabic singing; for he knew well letters, in Langue d'Oc and in Latin, and he knew Ovid, of whom he takes Atalanta; and may be Virgil; and he talks of the Palux Lerna, though most copyers have writ this "Uzerna," not knowing the place he spoke of. So it is as like as not he knew Arabic music, and perhaps had heard, if he not understood the meaning, some song in rough Saxon letters.
And by making song in _rimas escarsas_ he let into Provençal poetry many words that are not found elsewhere and maybe some words half Latin, and he uses many more sounds on the rhyme, for, as Canello or Lavaud has written, he uses ninety-eight rhyme sounds in seventeen canzos, and Peire Vidal makes use of but fifty-eight in fifty-four canzos and Folquet of thirty-three in twenty-two poems, and Raimbaut Orenga uses 129 rhymes in thirty-four poems, a lower proportion than Arnaut's. And the songs of En Arnaut are in some versets wholly free and uneven the whole length of the verset, then the other five versets follow in the track of the first, for the same tune must be sung in them all, or sung with very slight or orderly changes. But after the earlier poems he does not rhyme often inside the stanza. And in all he is very cunning, and has many uneven and beautiful rhythms, so that if a man try to read him like English iambic he will very often go wrong; though En Arnaut made the first piece of "Blank Verse" in the seven opening lines of the "Sols sui"; and he, maybe, in thinning out the rhymes and having but six repetitions to a canzone, made way for Dante who sang his long poem in threes. But this much is certain, he does not use the rhyme _-atage_ and many other common rhymes of the Provençal, whereby so many canzos are all made alike and monotonous on one sound or two sounds to the end from the beginning.
Nor is there much gap from "Lancan vei fueill'" or "D'autra guiza" to the form of the sonnet, or to the receipt for the Italian strophes of canzoni, for we have both the repetition and the unrepeating sound in the verset. And in two versets the rhymes run _abab cde abab cde_; in one, and in the other _abba cde abba cde_; while in sonnets the rhymes run _abab abab cde cde_; or _abba abba cde cde_. And this is no very great difference. A sonetto would be the third of a _son_.
And I do not give "Ac et no l'ac," for it is plainly told us that he learnt this song from a jongleur, and he says as much in his coda:
Miells-de-ben ren Sit pren Chanssos grazida C'Arnautz non oblida.
"Give thanks my song, to Miells-de-ben that Arnaut has not forgotten thee." And the matter went as a joke, and the song was given to Arnaut to sing in his repertoire "E fo donatz lo cantar an Ar Daniel, qui et aysi trobaretz en sa obra." And I do not give the tenzon with Trues Malecs for reasons clear to all who have read it; nor do I translate the sestina, for it is a poor one, but maybe it is interesting to think if the music will not go through its permutation as the end words change their places in order, though the first line has only eight syllables.
And En Arnaut was the best artist among the Provençals, trying the speech in new fashions, and bringing new words into writing, and making new blendings of words, so that he taught much to Messire Dante Alighieri as you will see if you study En Arnaut and the "De Vulgari Eloquio"; and when Dante was older and had well thought the thing over he said simply, "il miglior fabbro." And long before Francesco Petrarca, he, Arnaut, had thought of the catch about _Laura_, laura, l'aura, and the rest of it, which is no great thing to his credit. But no man in Provençal has written as he writes in "Doutz brais": "E quel remir" and the rest of it, though Ovid, where he recounts Atalanta's flight from Hippomenes in the tenth book, had written:
"cum super atria velum "Candida purpureum simulatas inficit umbras."
And in Dante we have much in the style of:
"Que jes Rozers per aiga que l'engrois."
And Dante learned much from his rhyming, and follows him in _agro_ and _Meleagro_, but more in a comprehension, and Dante has learned also of Ovid: "in Metamorphoseos":
"Velut ales, ab alto "Quae teneram prolem produxit in æra nido,"
although he talks so much of Virgil.
I had thought once of the mantle of indigo as of a thing seen in a vision, but I have now only fancy to support this. It is like that men slandered Arnaut for Dante's putting him in his Purgatorio, but the Trucs Malecs poem is against this.
En Arnaut often ends a canzone with a verset in different tone from the rest, as markedly in "Si fos Amors." In "Breu brisaral" the music is very curious, but is lost for us, for there are only two pieces of his music, and those in Milan, at the Ambrosiana (in R 71 superiore).
And at the end of "Doutz brais," is a verset like the verset of a sirvente, and this is what he wrote as a message, not making a whole sirvente, nor, so far as we know, dabbling in politics or writing of it, as Bertrans de Born has; only in this one place is all that is left us. And he was a joglar, perhaps for his living, and only composed when he would, and could not to order, as is shown in the story of his remembering the joglar's canzone when he had laid a wager to make one of his own.
"Can chai la fueilla" is more like a sea song or an _estampida_, though the editors call it a canzone, and "Amors e jois," and some others were so little thought of, that only two writers have copied them out in the manuscripts; and the songs are all different one from another, and their value nothing like even. Dante took note of the best ones, omitting "Doutz brais," which is for us perhaps the finest of all, though having some lines out of strict pertinence. But "Can chai la fueilla" is very cleverly made with five, six, and four and seven. And in "Sols sui" and in other canzos verse is syllabic, and made on the number of syllables, not by stresses, and the making by syllables cannot be understood by those of Petramala, who imagine the language they speak was that spoken by Adam, and that one system of metric was made in the world's beginning, and has since existed without change. And some think if the stress fall not on every second beat, or the third, that they must have right before Constantine. And the art of En Ar. Daniel is not literature but the art of fitting words well with music, well nigh a lost art, and if one will look to the music of "Chansson doil motz," or to the movement of "Can chai la fueilla," one will see part of that which I mean, and if one will look to the falling of the rhymes in other poems, and the blending and lengthening of the sounds, and their sequence, one will learn more of this. And En Arnaut wrote between 1180 and 1200 of the era, as nearly as we can make out, when the Provençal was growing weary, and it was to be seen if it could last, and he tried to make almost a new language, or at least to enlarge the Langue d'Oc, and make new things possible. And this scarcely happened till Guinicello, and Guido Cavalcanti and Dante; Peire Cardinal went to realism and made satirical poems. But the art of singing to music went well nigh out of the words, for Metastasio has left a few catches, and so has Lorenzo di Medici, but in Bel Canto in the times of Durante, and Piccini, Paradeis, Vivaldi, Caldara and Benedetto Marcello, the music turns the words out of doors and strews; them and distorts them to the tune, out of all recognition and the philosophic canzoni of Dante and his times--men are not understandable if they are sung, and in their time music and poetry parted company; the canzone's tune becoming a sonata without singing. And the ballad is a shorter form, and the Elizabethan lyrics are but scraps and bits of canzoni much as in the "nineties" men wrote scraps of Swinburne.
Charles d'Orléans made good roundels and songs, as in "Dieu qui la fait" and in "Quand j'oie la tambourine," as did also Jean Froissart before him in:
Reviens, ami; trop longue est ta demeure: Elle me fait avoir peine et doulour. Mon esperit te demande à toute heure. Reviens, ami; trop longue est ta demeure.
Car il n'est nul, fors toi, qui me sequerre, Ne secourra, jusques à ton retour. Reviens, ami; trop longue est ta demeure: Elle me fait avoir peine et doulour.
And in:
Le corps s'en va, mais le cœur vous demeure.
And in:
On doit le temps ainsi prendre qu'il vient: Tout dit que pas ne dure la fortune. Un temps se part, et puis l'autre revient: On doit le temps ainsi prendre qu'il vient.
Je me comforte en ce qu'il me souvient Que tous les mois avons nouvelle lune: On doit le temps ainsi prendre qu'il vient: Tout dit que pas ne dure la fortune.
Which is much what Bernart de Ventadour has sung:
"Per dieu, dona, pauc esplecham d'amor Va sen lo temps e perdem lo melhor."
And Campion was the last, but in none of the later men is there the care and thought of En Arnaut Daniel for the blending of words sung out; and none of them all succeeded, as indeed he had not succeeded in reviving and making permanent a poetry that could be sung. But none of them all had thought so of the sound of the words with the music, all in sequence and set together as had En Arnaut of Ribeyrac, nor had, I think, even Dante Alighieri when he wrote "De Eloquio."
And we find in Provence beautiful poems, as by Vidal when he sings:
"Ab l'alen tir vas me l'aire,"
And by the Viscount of St. Antoni:
"Lo clar temps vei brunezir E'ls auzeletz esperdutz, Que'l fregz ten destregz e mutz E ses conort de jauzir. Donc eu que de cor sospir Per la gensor re qu'anc fos, Tan joios Son, qu'ades m'es vis Que folh' e flor s'espandis. D'amor son tug miei cossir...."
and by Bertrans de Born in "Dompna puois di me," but these people sang not so many diverse kinds of music as En Arnaut, nor made so many good poems in different fashions, nor thought them so carefully, though En Bertrans sings with more vigor, it may be, and in the others, in Cerclamon, Arnaut of Marvoil, in de Ventadour, there are beautiful passages. And if the art, now in France, of saying a song--_disia sons_, we find written of more than one troubadour--is like the art of En Arnaut, it has no such care for the words, nor such ear for hearing their consonance.
Nor among the Provençals was there any one, nor had Dante thought out an æsthetic of sound; of clear sounds and opaque sounds, such as in "Sols sui," an opaque sound like Swinburne at his best; and in "Doutz brais" and in "L'aura amara" a clear sound, with staccato; and of heavy beats and of running and light beats, as very heavy in "Can chai la fueilla." Nor do we enough notice how with his drollery he is in places nearer to Chaucer than to the Italians, and indeed the Provençal is usually nearer the English in sound and in feeling, than it is to the Italian, having a softer humor, not a bitter tongue, as have the Italians in ridicule.
Nor have any yet among students taken note enough of the terms, both of love terms, and of terms of the singing; though theology was precise in its terms, and we should see clearly enough in Dante's treatise when he uses such words as _pexa, hirsuta, lubrica_, combed, and shaggy and oily to put his words into categories, that he is thinking exactly. Would the Age of Aquinas have been content with anything less? And so with the love terms, and so, as I have said in my Guido, with metaphors and the exposition of passion. Cossir, solatz, plazers, have in them the beginning of the Italian philosophic precisions, and _amors qu'inz el cor mi plou_ is not a vague decoration. By the time of Petrarca the analysis had come to an end, only the vague decorations were left. And if Arnaut is long before Cavalcanti,
Pensar de lieis m'es repaus E traigom ams los huoills cranes, S'a lieis vezer nols estuich.
leads toward "E gli occhi orbati fa vedere scorto," though the music in Arnaut is not, in this place, quickly apprehended. And those who fear to take a bold line in their interpretation of "Cill de Doma," might do worse than re-read:
"Una figura de la donna mia"
and what follows it. And for the rest any man who would read Arnaut and the troubadours owes great thanks to Emil Levy of Freiburg i/b for his long work and his little dictionary (Petit Dictionaire Provençal-Français, Karl Winter's Universitätsbuchhandlung, Heidelberg), and to U.A. Canello, the first editor of Arnaut, who has shown, I think, great profundity in his arrangement of the poems in their order, and has really hit upon their sequence of composition, and the developments of En Arnaut's trobar; and lastly to René Lavaud for his new Tolosan edition.
II
The twenty-three students of Provençal and the seven people seriously interested in the technic and æsthetic of verse may communicate with me in person. I give here only enough to illustrate the points of the _razo_, that is to say, as much as, and probably more than, the general reader can be bothered with. The translations are a make-shift; it is not to be expected that I can do in ten years what it took two hundred troubadours a century and a half to accomplish; for the full understanding of Arnaut's system of echoes and blending there is no substitute for the original; but in extenuation of the language of my verses, I would point out that the Provençals were not constrained by the modern literary sense. Their restraints were the tune and rhyme-scheme, they were not constrained by a need for certain qualities of writing, without which no modern poem is complete or satisfactory. They were not competing with De Maupassant's prose. Their triumph is, as I have said, in an art between literature and music; if I have succeeded in indicating some of the properties of the latter I have also let the former go by the board. It is quite possible that if the troubadours had been bothered about "style," they would not have brought their blend of word and tune to so elaborate a completion.
"Can chai la fueilla" is interesting for its rhythm, for the sea-chantey swing produced by simple device of cæsuræ:
Can chai la fueilla dels ausors entrecims, El freitz s'ergueilla don sechal vais' el vims, Dels dous refrims vei sordezir la brueilla; Mas ieu soi prims d'amor, qui que s'en tueilla.
The poem does not keep the same rhyme throughout, and the only reason for giving the whole of it in my English dither is that one can _not_ get the effect of the thumping and iterate foot-beat from one or two strophes alone.
CAN CHAI LA FUEILLA
When sere leaf falleth from the high forkèd tips, And cold appalleth dry osier, haws and hips, Coppice he strips of bird, that now none calleth. Fordel[1] my lips in love have, though he galleth.
Though all things freeze here, I can naught feel the cold, For new love sees, here my heart's new leaf unfold; So am I rolled and lapped against the breeze here: Love who doth mould my force, force guarantees here.
Aye, life's a high thing, where joy's his maintenance, Who cries 'tis wry thing hath danced never my dance, I can advance no blame against fate's tithing For lot and chance have deemed the best thing my thing.
Of love's wayfaring I know no part to blame, All other paring, compared, is put to shame, Man can acclaim no second for comparing With her, no dame but hath the meaner bearing.
I'ld ne'er entangle my heart with other fere, Although I mangle my joy by staying here I have no fear that ever at Pontrangle You'll find her peer or one that's worth a wrangle.
She'd ne'er destroy her man with cruelty 'Twixt here 'n' Savoy there feeds no fairer she, Than pleaseth me till Paris had ne'er joy In such degree from Helena in Troy.
She's so the rarest who holdeth me thus gay, The thirty fairest can not contest her sway; 'Tis right, par fay, thou know, O song that wearest Such bright array, whose quality thou sharest.
Chançon, nor stay till to her thou declarest: "Arnaut would say me not, wert thou not fairest."
"Lancan son passat" shows the simple and presumably early style of Arnaut, with the kind of reversal from more or less trochaic to more or less iambic movement in fifth and eighth lines, a _kind_ of rhythm taken over by Elizabethan lyricists. Terms trochaic and iambic are, however, utterly inaccurate when applied to syllabic metres set to a particular melody:
Lancan son passat li giure E noi reman puois ni comba, Et el verdier la flors trembla Sus el entrecim on poma, La flors e li chan eil clar quil Ab la sazon doussa e coigna M'enseignon c'ab joi m'apoigna, Sai al temps de l'intran d'April.
LANCAN SON PASSAT LI GIURE
When the frosts are gone and over, And are stripped from hill and hollow, When in close the blossom blinketh From the spray where the fruit cometh, The flower and song and the clarion Of the gay season and merry Bid me with high joy to bear me Through days while April's coming on.
Though joy's right hard to discover, Such sly ways doth false Love follow, Only sure he never drinketh At the fount where true faith hometh; A thousand girls, but two or one Of her falsehoods over chary, Stabbing whom vows make unwary Their tenderness is vilely done.
The most wise runs drunkest lover, Sans pint-pot or wine to swallow, If a whim her locks unlinketh, One stray hair his noose becometh. When evasion's fairest shown, Then the sly puss purrs most near ye. Innocents at heart beware ye, When she seems colder than a nun.
See, I thought so highly of her! Trusted, but the game is hollow, Not one won piece soundly clinketh; All the cardinals that Rome hath, Yea, they all were put upon. Her device is "Slyly Wary." Cunning are the snares they carry, Yet while they watched they'd be undone.
Whom Love makes so mad a rover, 'll take a cuckoo for a swallow, If she say so, sooth! he thinketh There's a plain where Puy-de-Dome is. Till his eyes and nails are gone, He'll throw dice and follow fairly --Sure as old tales never vary-- For his fond heart he is foredone.
Well I know, sans writing's cover, What a plain is, what's a hollow. I know well whose honor sinketh, And who 'tis that shame consumeth. They meet. I lose reception. 'Gainst this cheating I'd not parry Nor amid such false speech tarry, But from her lordship will be gone.
_Coda_
Sir Bertran,[2] sure no pleasure's won Like this freedom naught, so merry 'Twixt Nile 'n' where the suns miscarry To where the rain falls from the sun.
The fifth poem in Canello's arrangement, "Lanquan vei fueill' e flor e frug," has strophes in the form:
When I see leaf, and flower and fruit Come forth upon light lynd and bough, And hear the frogs in rillet bruit, And birds quhitter in forest now, Love inkirlie doth leaf and flower and bear, And trick my night from me, and stealing waste it, Whilst other wight in rest and sleep sojourneth.
The sixth is in the following pattern, and the third strophe translates:
Hath a man rights at love? No grain. Yet gowks think they've some legal lien. But she'll blame you with heart serene That, ships for Bari sink, mid-main, Or cause the French don't come from Gascony And for such crimes I am nigh in my shroud, Since, by the Christ, I do such crimes or none.
"Autet e bas" is interesting for the way in which Arnaut breaks the flow of the poem to imitate the bird call in "Cadahus en son us," and the repetitions of this sound in the succeeding strophes, highly treble, presumably, Neis Jhezus, Mas pel us, etc.
Autet e bas entrels prims fuoills Son nou de flors li ram eil renc E noi ten mut bec ni gola Nuills auzels, anz braia e chanta Cadahus En son us; Per joi qu'ai d'els e del temps Chant, mas amors mi asauta Quils motz ab lo son acorda.
AUTET E BAS ENTRELS PRIMS FUOILLS
_"Cadahus En son us."_
Now high and low, where leaves renew, Come buds on bough and spalliard pleach And no beak nor throat is muted; Auzel each in tune contrasted Letteth loose Wriblis[3] spruce. Joy for them and spring would set Song on me, but Love assaileth Me and sets my words t' his dancing.
I thank my God and mine eyes too, Since through them the perceptions reach, Porters of joys that have refuted Every ache and shame I've tasted; They reduce Pains, and noose Me in Amor's corded net. Her beauty in me prevaileth Till bonds seem but joy's advancing.
My thanks, Amor, that I win through; Thy long delays I naught impeach; Though flame's in my marrow rooted I'd not quench it, well't hath lasted, Burns profuse, Held recluse Lest knaves know our hearts are met, Murrain on the mouth that aileth, So he finds her not entrancing.
He doth in Love's book misconstrue, And from that book none can him teach, Who saith ne'er's in speech recruited Aught, whereby the heart is dasted. Words' abuse Doth traduce Worth, but I run no such debt. Right 'tis in man over-raileth He tear tongue on tooth mischancing.[4]
That I love her, is pride, is true, But my fast secret knows no breach. Since Paul's writ was executed Or the forty days first fasted, Not Cristus Could produce Her similar, where one can get Charms total, for no charm faileth Her who's memory's enhancing.
Grace and valor, the keep of you She is, who holds me, each to each, She sole, I sole, so fast suited, Other women's lures are wasted, And no truce But misuse Have I for them, they're not let
To my heart, where she regaleth Me with delights l'm not chancing.
Arnaut loves, and ne'er will fret Love with o'er-speech, his throat quaileth, Braggart voust is naught t' his fancy.
In the next poem we have the chatter of birds in autumn, the onomatopœia obviously depends upon the "_-utz, -etz, -ences_ and _-ortz_" of the rhyme scheme, 17 of the 68 syllables of each strophe therein included. I was able to keep the English in the same sound as the _Cadahus_, but I have not been able to make more than map of the relative positions in this canzos.
L'aura amara Fais bruoilss brancutz Clarzir Quel doutz espeissa ab fuoills, Els letz Becs Dels auzels ramencs Ten balps e mutz, Pars E non-pars; Per qu'eu m'esfortz De far e dir Plazers A mains per liei Que m'a virat bas d'aut, Don tem morir Sils afans no m'asoma.
I
The bitter air Strips panoply From trees Where softer winds set leaves, And glad Beaks Now in brakes are coy, Scarce peep the wee Mates And un-mates. What gaud's the work? What good the glees? What curse I strive to shake! Me hath she cast from high, In fell disease I lie, and deathly fearing.
II
So clear the flare That first lit me To seize Her whom my soul believes; If cad Sneaks, Blabs, slanders, my joy Counts little fee Baits And their hates. I scorn their perk And preen, at ease. Disburse Can she, and wake Such firm delights, that I Am hers, froth, lees Bigod! from toe to earring.
III
Amor, look yare! Know certainly The keys: How she thy suit receives; Nor add Piques, 'Twere folly to annoy. I'm true, so dree Fates; No debates Shake me, nor jerk. My verities Turn terse, And yet I ache; Her lips, not snows that fly Have potencies To slake, to cool my searing.
IV
Behold my prayer, (Or company Of these) Seeks whom such height achieves; Well clad Seeks Her, and would not cloy. Heart apertly States Thought. Hope waits 'Gainst death to irk: False brevities And worse! To her I raik.[5] Sole her; all others' dry Felicities I count not worth the leering.
V
Ah, visage, where Each quality But frees One pride-shaft more, that cleaves Me; mad frieks (O' thy beck) destroy, And mockery Baits Me, and rates. Yet I not shirk Thy velleities, Averse Me not, nor slake Desire. God draws not nigh To Dome,[6] with pleas Wherein's so little veering.
VI
Now chant prepare, And melody To please The king, who'll judge thy sheaves. Worth, sad, Sneaks Here; double employ Hath there. Get thee Plates Full, and cates, Gifts, go! Nor lurk Here till decrees Reverse, And ring thou take. Straight t' Arago I'd ply Cross the wide seas But "Rome" disturbs my hearing.
_Coda._
At midnight mirk, In secrecies I nurse My served make[7] In heart; nor try My melodies At other's door nor mearing.[8]
The eleventh canzo is mainly interesting for the opening bass onomatopœia of the wind rowting in the autumn branches. Arnaut may have caught his alliteration from the joglar engles, a possible hrimm-hramm-hruffer, though the device dates at least from Naevius.
En breu brisaral temps braus, Eill bisa busina els brancs Qui s'entreseignon trastuich De sobreclaus rams de fuoilla; Car noi chanta auzels ni piula M' enseign' Amors qu'ieu fassa adonc Chan que non er segons ni tertz Ans prims d'afrancar cor agre.
The rhythm is too tricky to be caught at the first reading, or even at the fifth reading; there is only part of it in my copy.
Briefly bursteth season brisk, Blasty north breeze racketh branch, Branches rasp each branch on each Tearing twig and tearing leafage, Chirms now no bird nor cries querulous; So Love demands I make outright A song that no song shall surpass For freeing the heart of sorrow.
Love is glory's garden close, And is a pool of prowess staunch Whence get ye many a goodly fruit If true man come but to gather. Dies none frost bit nor yet snowily, For true sap keepeth off the blight Unless knave or dolt there pass....
The second point of interest is the lengthening out of the rhyme in _piula, niula_, etc. In the fourth strophe we find:
The gracious thinking and the frank Clear and quick perceiving heart Have led me to the fort of love. Finer she is, and I more loyal Than were Atlanta and Meleager.
Then the quiet conclusion, after the noise of the opening, Pensar de lieis m'es repaus:
To think of her is my rest And both of my eyes are strained wry When she stands not in their sight, Believe not the heart turns from her, For nor prayers nor games nor violing Can move me from her a reed's-breadth.
The most beautiful passages of Arnaut are in the canzo beginning:
Doutz brais e critz, Lais e cantars e voutas Aug dels auzels qu'en lor latins fant precs Quecs ab sa par, atressi cum nos fam A las amigas en cui entendem; E doncas ieu qu'en la genssor entendi Dei far chansson sobre totz de bell' obra Que noi aia mot fais ni rima estrampa.
GLAMOUR AND INDIGO
Sweet cries and cracks and lays and chants inflected By auzels who, in their Latin belikes, Chirm each to each, even as you and I Pipe toward those girls on whom our thoughts attract; Are but more cause that I, whose overweening Search is toward the Noblest, set in cluster Lines where no word pulls wry, no rhyme breaks gauges.
No culs de sacs nor false ways me deflected When first I pierced her fort within its dykes, Hers, for whom my hungry insistency Passes the gnaw whereby was Vivien wracked;[9] Day-long I stretch, all times, like a bird preening, And yawn for her, who hath o'er others thrust her As high as true joy is o'er ire and rages.
Welcome not lax, and my words were protected Not blabbed to other, when I set my likes On her. Not brass but gold was 'neath the die. That day we kissed, and after it she flacked O'er me her cloak of indigo, for screening Me from all culvertz' eyes, whose blathered bluster Can set such spites abroad; win jibes for wages.
God who did tax not Longus' sin,[10] respected That blind centurion beneath the spikes And him forgave, grant that we two shall lie Within one room, and seal therein our pact, Yes, that she kiss me in the half-light, leaning To me, and laugh and strip and stand forth in the lustre Where lamp-light with light limb but half engages.
The flowers wax with buds but half perfected; Tremble on twig that shakes when the bird strikes-- But not more fresh than she! No empery, Though Rome and Palestine were one compact, Would lure me from her; and with hands convening I give me to her. But if kings could muster In homage similar, you'd count them sages.
Mouth, now what knacks! What folly hath infected Thee? Gifts, that th' Emperor of the Salonikes Or Lord of Rome were greatly honored by, Or Syria's lord, thou dost from me distract; O fool I am! to hope for intervening? From Love that shields not love! Yea, it were juster To call him mad, who 'gainst his joy engages.
POLITICAL POSTSCRIPT
The slimy jacks with adders' tongues bisected, I fear no whit, nor have; and if these tykes Have led Galicia's king to villeiny----[11] His cousin in pilgrimage hath he attacked-- We know--Raimon the Count's son--my meaning Stands without screen. The royal filibuster Redeems not honor till he unbar the cages.
CODA
I should have seen it, but I was on such affair, Seeing the true king crown'd here in Estampa.[12]
Arnaut's tendency to lengthen the latter lines of the strophe after the diesis shows in: Er vei vermeils, vertz, blaus, blancs, gruocs, the strophe form being:
Vermeil, green, blue, peirs, white, cobalt, Close orchards, hewis, holts, hows, vales, And the bird-song that whirls and turns Morning and late with sweet accord, Bestir my heart to put my song in sheen T'equal that flower which hath such properties, It seeds in joy, bears love, and pain ameises.
The last cryptic allusion is to the quasi-allegorical descriptions of the tree of love in some long poem like the Romaunt of the Rose.
Dante takes the next poem as a model of canzo construction; and he learned much from its melody:
Sols sui qui sai lo sobrefan quern sortz Al cor d'amor sofren per sobramar, Car mos volers es tant ferms et entiers Cane no s'esduis de celliei ni s'estors Cui encubric al prim vezer e puois: Qu'ades ses lieis die a lieis cochos motz, Pois quan la vei non sai, tant l'ai, que dire.
We note the soft suave sound as against the staccato of "L'aura amara."
_Canzon._
I only, and who elrische pain support Know out love's heart o'er borne by overlove, For my desire that is so firm and straight And unchanged since I found her in my sight And unturned since she came within my glance, That far from her my speech springs up aflame; Near her comes not. So press the words to arrest it.
I am blind to others, and their retort I hear not. In her alone, I see, move, Wonder.... And jest not. And the words dilate Not truth; but mouth speaks not the heart outright: I could not walk roads, flats, dales, hills, by chance, To find charm's sum within one single frame As God hath set in her t'assay and test it.
And I have passed in many a goodly court To find in hers more charm than rumor thereof.... In solely hers. Measure and sense to mate, Youth and beauty learnèd in all delight, Gentrice did nurse her up, and so adyance Her fair beyond all reach of evil name, To clear her worth, no shadow hath oppresst it.
Her contact flats not out, falls not off short.... Let her, I pray, guess out the sense hereof For never will it stand in open prate Until my inner heart stand in daylight, So that heart pools him when her eyes entrance, As never doth the Rhone, fulled and untame, Pool, where the freshets tumult hurl to crest it.
Flimsy another's joy, false and distort, No paregale that she springs not above.... Her love-touch by none other mensurate. To have it not? Alas! Though the pains bite Deep, torture is but galzeardy and dance, For in my thought my lust hath touched his aim. God! Shall I get no more! No fact to best it!
No delight I, from now, in dance or sport, Nor will these toys a tinkle of pleasure prove, Compared to her, whom no loud profligate Shall leak abroad how much she makes my right. Is this too much? If she count not mischance What I have said, then no. But if she blame, Then tear ye out the tongue that hath expresst it.
The song begs you: Count not this speech ill chance, But if you count the song worth your acclaim, Arnaut cares lyt who praise or who contest it.
The XVIth canto goes on with the much discussed and much too emphasized cryptogram of the ox and the hare. I am content with the reading which gives us a classic allusion in the palux Laerna. The lengthening of the verse in the last three lines of the strophe is, I think, typically Arnaut's. I leave the translation solely for the sake of one strophe.
Ere the winter recommences And the leaf from bough is wrested, On Love's mandate will I render A brief end to long prolusion: So well have I been taught his steps and paces That I can stop the tidal-sea's inflowing. My stot outruns the hare; his speed amazes.
Me he bade without pretences That I go not, though requested; That I make no whit surrender Nor abandon our seclusion: "Differ from violets, whose fear effaces Their hue ere winter; behold the glowing Laurel stays, stay thou. Year long the genet blazes."
"You who commit no offences 'Gainst constancy; have not quested; Assent not! Though a maid send her Suit to thee. Think you confusion Will come to her who shall track out your traces? And give your enemies a chance for boasts and crowing? No! After God, see that she have your praises."
Coward, shall I trust not defences! Faint ere the suit be tested? Follow! till she extend her Favour. Keep on, try conclusion For if I get in this naught but disgraces, Then must I pilgrimage past Ebro's flowing And seek for luck amid the Lernian mazes.
If I've passed bridge-rails and fences, Think you then that I am bested? No, for with no food or slender Ration, I'd have joy's profusion To hold her kissed, and there are never spaces Wide to keep me from her, but she'd be showing In my heart, and stand forth before his gazes.
Lovelier maid from Nile to Sences Is not vested nor divested, So great is her bodily splendor That you would think it illusion. Amor, if she but hold me in her embraces, I shall not feel cold hail nor winter's blowing Nor break for all the pain in fever's dazes.
Arnaut hers from foot to face is, He would not have Lucerne, without her, owing Him, nor lord the land whereon the Ebro grazes.
The feminine rhyming throughout and the shorter opening lines keep the strophe much lighter and more melodic than that of the canzo which Canello prints last of all.
SIM FOS AMORS DE JOI DONAR TANT LARGA
"_Ingenium nobis ipsa puella facit." Propertius II, I._
Sim fos Amors de joi donar tant larga Cum ieu vas lieis d'aver fin cor e franc, Ja per gran ben nom calgra far embarc Qu'er am tant aut quel pes mi poia em tomba; Mas quand m' albir cum es de pretz al som Mout m'en am mais car anc l'ausiei voler, C'aras sai ieu que mos cors e mos sens Mi farant far lor grat rica conquesta.
Had Love as little need to be exhorted To give me joy, as I to keep a frank And ready heart toward her, never he'd blast My hope, whose very height hath high exalted, And cast me down ... to think on my default, And her great worth; yet thinking what I dare, More love myself, and know my heart and sense Shall lead me to high conquest, unmolested.
I am, spite long delay, pooled and contorted And whirled with all my streams 'neath such a bank Of promise, that her fair words hold me fast In joy, and will, until in tomb I am halted. As I'm not one to change hard gold for spalt, And no alloy's in her, that debonaire Shall hold my faith and mine obedience Till, by her accolade, I am invested.
Long waiting hath brought in and hath extorted The fragrance of desire; throat and flank The longing takes me ... and with pain surpassed By her great beauty. Seemeth it hath vaulted O'er all the rest ... them doth it set in fault So that whoever sees her anywhere Must see how charm and every excellence Hold sway in her, untaint, and uncontested.
Since she is such; longing no wise detorted Is in me ... and plays not the mountebank, For all my sense is her, and is compassed Solely in her; and no man is assaulted (By God his dove!) by such desires as vault In me, to have great excellence. My care On her so stark, I can show tolerance To jacks whose joy's to see fine loves uncrested.
Miels-de-Ben, have not your heart distorted Against me now; your love has left me blank, Void, empty of power or will to turn or cast Desire from me ... not brittle,[13] nor defaulted. Asleep, awake, to thee do I exalt And offer me. No less, when I lie bare Or wake, my will to thee, think not turns thence, For breast and throat and head hath it attested.
Pouch-mouthed blubberers, culrouns and aborted, May flame bite in your gullets, sore eyes and rank T' the lot of you, you've got my horse, my last Shilling, too; and you'd see love dried and salted. God blast you all that you can't call a halt! God's itch to you, chit-cracks that overbear And spoil good men, ill luck your impotence!! More told, the more you've wits smeared and congested.
CODA
Arnaut has borne delay and long defence And will wait long to see his hopes well nested.
[In De Vulgari Eloquio II, 13, Dante calls for freedom in the rhyme order within the strophe, and cites this canzo of Arnaut's as an example of poem where there is no rhyme within the single strophe. Dante's "Rithimorum quoque relationi vacemus" implies no carelessness concerning the blending of rhyme sounds, for we find him at the end of the chapter "et tertio rithimorum asperitas, nisi forte sit lenitati permista: nam lenium asperorumque rithimorum mixtura ipsa tragoedia nitescit," as he had before demanded a mixture of shaggy and harsh words with the softer words of a poem. "Nimo scilicet eiusdem rithimi repercussio, nisi forte novum aliquid atque intentatum artis hoc sibi praeroget." The De Eloquio is ever excellent testimony of the way in which, a great artist approaches the detail of métier.]
[1] Preëminence.
[2] Presumably De Born.
[3] Wriblis = warblings.
[4] This is nearly as bad in the original.
[5] Raik = haste precipitate.
[6] Our Lady of Poi de Dome? No definite solution of this reference yet found.
[7] Make = mate, fere, companion.
[8] Dante cites this poem in the second book of De Vulgari Eloquio with poems of his own, De Born's, and Cino Pistoija's.
[9] Vivien, strophe 2, nebotz Sain Guillem, an allusion to the romance "Enfances Vivien."
[10] Longus, centurion in the crucifixion legend.
[11] King of the Galicians, Ferdinand II, King of Galicia, 1157-88, son of Berangere, sister of Raimon Berenger IV ("quattro figlie ebbe," etc.) of Aragon, Count of Barcelona. His second son, Lieutenant of Provence, 1168.
[12] King crowned at Etampe, Phillipe August, crowned May 29, 1180, at age of 16. This poem might date Arnaut's birth as early as 1150.
[13] "Brighter than glass, and yet as glass is, brittle." The comparisons to glass went out of poetry when glass ceased to be a rare, precious substance. (_Cf_. Passionate Pilgrim, III.)
VIII
TRANSLATORS OF GREEK
EARLY TRANSLATORS OF HOMER
I. HUGHES SALEL
The dilection of Greek poets has waned during the last pestilent century, and this decline has, I think, kept pace with a decline in the use of Latin cribs to Greek authors. The classics have more and more become a baton exclusively for the cudgelling of schoolboys, and less and less a diversion for the mature.
I do not imagine I am the sole creature who has been well taught his Latin and very ill-taught his Greek (beginning at the age, say, of twelve, when one is unready to discriminate matters of style, and when the economy of the adjective cannot be wholly absorbing). A child may be bulldozed into learning almost anything, but man accustomed to some degree of freedom is loath to approach a masterpiece through five hundred pages of grammar. Even a scholar like Porson may confer with former translators.
We have drifted out of touch with the Latin authors as well, and we have mislaid the fine English versions: Golding's _Metamorphoses_; Gavin Douglas' _Æneids;_ Marlowe's _Eclogues_ from Ovid, in each of which books a great poet has compensated, by his own skill, any loss in transition; a new beauty has in each case been created. Greek in English remains almost wholly unsuccessful, or rather, there are glorious passages but no long or whole satisfaction. Chapman remains the best English "Homer," marred though he may be by excess of added ornament, and rather more marred by parentheses and inversions, to the point of being hard to read in many places.
And if one turn to Chapman for almost any favorite passage one is almost sure to be disappointed; on the other hand I think no one will excel him in the plainer passages of narrative, as of Priam's going to Achilles in the XXIVth Iliad. Yet he breaks down in Priam's prayer at just the point where the language should be the simplest and austerest.
Pope is easier reading, and, out of fashion though he is, he has at least the merit of translating Homer into _something_. The nadir of Homeric translation is reached by the Leaf-Lang prose; Victorian faddism having persuaded these gentlemen to a belief in King James fustian; their alleged prose has neither the concision of verse nor the virtues of direct motion. In their preface they grumble about Chapman's "mannerisms," yet their version is full of "Now behold I" and "yea even as" and "even as when," tushery possible only to an affected age bent on propaganda. For, having, despite the exclusion of the _Dictionnaire Philosophique_ from the island, finally found that the Bible couldn't be retained either as history or as private Reuter from J'hvh's Hebrew Press bureau, the Victorians tried to boom it, and even its wilfully bowdlerized translations, as literature.
"So spake he, and roused Athene that already was set thereon.... Even as the son of ... even in such guise...."
perhaps no worse than
"With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving"[1]
but bad enough anyway.
Of Homer two qualities remain untranslated: the magnificent onomatopœia, as of the rush of the waves on the sea-beach and their recession in:
_παρὰ θῖνα πολυΦλοίσβοιο θαλάσσης_
untranslated and untranslatable; and, secondly, the authentic cadence of speech; the absolute conviction that the words used, let us say by Achilles to the "dog-faced" chicken-hearted Agamemnon, are in the actual swing of words spoken. This quality of actual speaking is _not_ untranslatable. Note how Pope fails to translate it:
There sat the seniors of the Trojan race (Old Priam's chiefs, and most in Priam's grace): The king, the first; Thymœtes at his side; Lampus and Clytius, long in counsel try'd; Panthus and Hicetaon, once the strong; And next, the wisest of the reverend throng, Antenor grave, and sage Ucalegon, Lean'd on the walls, and bask'd before the sun. Chiefs, who no more in bloody fights engage, But wise through time, and narrative with age, In summer days like grasshoppers rejoice, A bloodless race, that send a feeble voice. These, when the Spartan queen approach'd the tower, In secret own'd resistless beauty's power: They cried, No wonder, such celestial charms For nine long years have set the world in arms! What winning graces! What majestic mien! She moves a goddess, and she looks a queen! Yet hence, oh Heaven, convey that fatal face, And from destruction save the Trojan race.
This is anything but the "surge and thunder," but it is, on the other hand, a definite idiom, within the limits of the rhymed pentameter couplet it is even musical in parts; there is imbecility in the antithesis, and bathos in "she looks a queen," but there is fine accomplishment in:
"Wise through time, and narrative with age,"
Mr. Pope's own invention, and excellent. What we definitely can _not_ hear is the voice of the old men speaking. The simile of the grasshoppers is well rendered, but the old voices do not ring in the ear.
Homer (iii. 156-160) reports their conversation:
_Οὐ νέμεσις, Τρὧας καὶ ἐϋκνήμιδας Αχαιοὺς_ _Τοιῇδ ἀμΦὶ γυναικὶ πολὺν χρόνον ἄλγεα πἀσχειν·_ _Αἰῶς ἀθανάτῃσι θεῇς εἰς ὦπα ἔοικεν._ _Ἀλλὰ καὶ ὣς, τοὶη περ εοῦς', ἐν νηυσὶ νεέσθω·_ _Μηδ' ἡμἰν τεκέεσσι τ' 'οπίσσω πῆμα λιποιτο._
Which is given in Sam. Clark's _ad verbum_ translation:
"Non _est_ indigne ferendum, Trojanos et bene-ocreatos Archivos Tali de muliere longum tempus dolores pati: Omnino immortalibus deabus ad vultum similis est. Sed et sic, talis quamvis sit, in navibus redeat, Neque nobis liberisque in posterum detrimentum relinquatur."
Mr. Pope has given six short lines for five long ones, but he has added "fatal" to face (or perhaps only lifted it from _νέμεσις_), he has added "winning graces," "majestic," "looks a queen." As for owning beauty's resistless power secretly or in the open, the Greek is:
_Τοῖοι ἄρα Τρώων ἡγήτορες ἧντ' ἐπὶ πύργῳ._ _Οἵ δ' ὡς οὦν εἶδον Ἑλένην ἐπὶ πύργον ἰοῦσαν,_ _Ἠκα πρὸς ἀλλήλους ἔηεα πτερόεντ' ἀγόρευον·_
and Sam. Clark as follows:
"Tales utique Trojanorum proceres sedebant in turri. Hi autem ut videruut Helenam ad turrim venientem, Submisse inter se verbis alatis dixerunt;"
_Ἠκα_ is an adjective of sound, it is purely objective, even _submisse_[2] is an addition; though _Ἠκα_ might, by a slight strain, be taken to mean that the speech of the old men came little by little, a phrase from each of the elders. Still it would be purely objective. It does not even say they spoke humbly or with resignation.
Chapman is no closer than his successor. He is so _galant_ in fact, that I thought I had found his description in Rochefort. The passage is splendid, but splendidly unhomeric:
"All grave old men, and soldiers they had been, but for age Now left the wars; yet counsellors they were exceedingly sage. And as in well-grown woods, on trees, cold spiny grasshoppers Sit chirping, and send voices out, that scarce can pierce our ears For softness, and their weak faint sounds; so, talking on the tow'r, These seniors of the people sat; who when they saw the pow'r Of beauty, in the queen, ascend, ev'n those cold-spirited peers, Those wise and almost wither'd men, found this heat in their years, That they were forc'd (though whispering) to say: 'What man can blame The Greeks and Trojans to endure, for so admir'd a dame, So many mis'ries, and so long? In her sweet count'nance shine Looks like the Goddesses. And yet (though never so divine) Before we boast, unjustly still, of her enforced prise, And justly suffer for her sake, with all our progenies, Labor and ruin, let her go; the profit of our land Must pass the beauty.' Thus, though these could bear so fit a hand On their affections, yet, when all their gravest powers were us'd They could not choose but welcome her, and rather they accus'd The Gods than beauty; for thus spake the most-fam'd king of Troy:"
The last sentence representing mostly "fis _Ὤς ἄρ ἔφα_ in the line:
_Ὤς ἄρ ἔφαν' Πρίαμος δ'Ἑλένην έκαλέσσατο φωνῇ_
"Sic dixerunt: Priamus autem Helenam vocavit voce."
Chapman is nearer Swinburne's ballad with:
"But those three following men," etc.
than to his alleged original.
Rochefort is as follows (_Iliade_, Livre iii, M. de Rochefort, 1772):
"Hélène à ce discours sentit naître en son âme Un doux ressouvenir de sa première flamme; Le désir de revoir les lieux qu'elle a quittés Jette un trouble inconnu dans ses sens agités. Tremblante elle se lève et les yeux pleins de larmes, D'un voile éblouissant elle couvre ses charmes; De deux femmes suivie elle vole aux remparts. La s'étaient assemblés ces illustres vieillards Qui courbés sous le faix des travaux et de l'age N'alloient plus au combat signaler leur courage, Mais qui, près de leur Roi, par de sages avis, Mieux qu'en leurs jeunes ans défendoient leur païs.
Dans leurs doux entretiens, leur voix toujours égale Ressembloit aux accents que forme la cigale, Lorsqu'aux longs jours d'été cachée en un buisson, Elle vient dans les champs annoncer la moisson. Une tendre surprise enflamma leurs visages; Frappés de ses appas, ils se disoient entre eux: 'Qui pourroit s'étonner que tant de Rois fameux, Depuis neuf ans entiers aient combattu pour elle? Sur le trône des cieux Vénus n'est pas plus belle. Mais quelque soit l'amour qu'inspirent ses attraits, Puisse Illion enfin la perdre pour jamais, Puisse-t-elle bientôt à son époux rendue, Conjurer l'infortune en ces lieux attendue.'"
Hugues Salel (1545), praised by Ronsard, is more pleasing:
"Le Roi Priam, et auec luy bon nombre De grandz Seigneurs estoient à l'ombre Sur les Crenaulx, Tymoetes et Panthus, Lampus, Clytus, excellentz en vertus, Hictaon renomme en bataille, Ucalegon iadis de fort taille, Et Antenor aux armes nompareil Mais pour alors ne seruantz qu'en conseil.
La, ces Vieillards assis de peur du Hasle Causoyent ensemble ainsi que la Cignalle Ou deux ou trois, entre les vertes fueilles, En temps d'Esté gazouillant a merveilles; Lesquelz voyans la diuine Gregeoise, Disoient entre eux que si la grande noise De ces deux camps duroit longe saision, Certainement ce n'estoit sans raision: Veu la Beaulté, et plus que humain outrage, Qui reluysoit en son diuin visaige. Ce neantmoins il vauldrait mieulx la rendre, (Ce disoyent ilz) sans guères plus attendre. Pour éviter le mal qui peult venir, Qui la voudra encores retenir."
Salel is a most delightful approach to the Iliads; he is still absorbed in the subject-matter, as Douglas and Golding were absorbed in their subject-matter. Note how exact he is in the rendering of the old men's mental attitude. Note also that he is right in his era. I mean simply that Homer _is_ a little _rustre_, a little, or perhaps a good deal, mediæval, he has not the dovetailing of Ovid. He has onomatopœia, as of poetry sung out; he has authenticity of conversation as would be demanded by an intelligent audience not yet laminated with æsthetics; capable of recognizing reality. He has the repetitions of the _chanson de geste_. Of all the French and English versions I think Salel alone gives any hint of some of these characteristics. Too obviously he is not onomatopœic, no. But he is charming, and readable, and "Briseis Fleur des Demoiselles" has her reality.
Nicolo Valla is, for him who runs, closer:
"Consili virtus, summis de rebus habebant Sermones, et multa inter se et magna loquentes, Arboribus quales gracili stridere cicadæ Sæpe solent cantu, postquam sub moenibus altis Tyndarida aspiciunt, procerum tum quisque fremebat, Mutuasque exorsi, Decuit tot funera Teucros Argolicasque pati, longique in tempore bellum Tantus in ore decor cui non mortalis in artus Est honor et vultu divina efflagrat imago. Diva licet facies, Danauum cum classe recedat Longius excido ne nos aut nostra fatiget Pignora sic illi tantis de rebus agebant."
This hexameter is rather heavily accented. It shows, perhaps, the source of various "ornaments" in later English and French translations. It has indubitable sonority even though monotonous.
It is the earliest Latin verse rendering I have yet come upon, and is bound in with Raphael of Volterra's first two Iliads, and some further renderings by Obsopeo.
_Odyssea_ (Liber primus) (1573).
"Dic mihi musa uirum captae post tempora Troiae Qui mores hominum multorum uidit et urbes Multa quoque et ponto passus dum naufragus errat Ut sibi tum sociis uitam seruaret in alto Non tamen hos cupens fato deprompsit acerbo Ob scelus admissum extinctos ausumque malignum Qui fame compulsu solis rapuere iuvencos Stulti ex quo reditum ad patrias deus abstulit oras. Horum itaque exitium memora mihi musa canenti."
_Odyssea_ (Lib. sec.) (1573).
"Cumprimum effulsit roseis aurora quadrigis Continuo e stratis proies consurgit Ulyxis Induit et uestes humerosque adcomodat ensem Molia denin pedibus formosis uincula nectit Parque deo egrediens thalamo praeconibus omnis Concilio cognant extemplo mandat Achaeos Ipse quoque ingentem properabat ad aedibus hastam Corripiens: gemenique canes comitantor euntem Quumque illi mirum Pallas veneranda decorem Preberer populus venientem suspicit omnis Inque throno patrio ueteres cessere sedenti."
The charm of Salel is continued in the following excerpts. They do not cry out for comment. I leave Ogilby's English and the lines of Latin to serve as contrast or cross-light.
_Iliade_ (Livre I). Hugues Salel (1545).[3]
THE IRE
"Je te supply Déesse gracieuse, Vouloir chanter l'Ire pernicieuse, Dont Achille fut tellement espris, Que par icelle, ung grand nombre d'espritz Des Princes Grecs, par dangereux encombres, Feit lors descente aux infernales Umbres. Et leurs beaulx Corps privéz de Sépulture Furent aux chiens et aux oiseaulx pasture."
_Iliade_ (Lib. III). John Ogilby (1660).
HELEN
"Who in this chamber, sumpteously adornd Sits on your ivory bed, nor could you say, By his rich habit, he had fought to-day: A reveller or masker so comes drest, From splendid sports returning to his rest. Thus did love's Queen warmer desires prepare. But when she saw her neck so heavenly faire, Her lovely bosome and celestial eyes, Amazed, to the Goddess, she replies: Why wilt thou happless me once more betray, And to another wealthy town convey, Where some new favourite must, as now at Troy With utter loss of honour me enjoy."
_Iliade_ (Livre VI). Salel.
GLAUCUS RESPOND À DIOMÈDE
"Adonc Glaucus, auec grace et audace, Luy respondit: 'T'enquiers tu de ma race? Le genre humain est fragile et muable Comme la fueille et aussi peu durable. Car tout ainsi qu'on uoit les branches uertes Sur le printemps de fueilles bien couuertes Qui par les uents d'automne et la froidure Tombent de l'arbre et perdent leur uerdure Puis de rechef la gelée passée, Il en reuient à la place laissée: Ne plus ne moins est du lignage humain: Tel est huy uif qui sera mort demain. S'il en meurt ung, ung autre reuint naistre. Voylà comment se conserue leur estre.'"
_Iliade_ (Lib. VI). As in Virgil, Dante, and others.
"Quasim gente rogas? Quibus et natalibus ortus? Persimile est foliis hominum genus omne caduciis Quae nunc nata uides, pulchrisque, uirescere sylvis Automno ueniente cadunt, simul illa perurens Incubuit Boreas: quaedam sub uerna renasci Tempora, sic uice perpetua succrescere lapsis, Semper item nova, sic alliis obeuntibus, ultro Succedunt alii luuenes aetate grauatis. Quod si forte iuvat te qua sit quisque suorum Stirpe satus, si natales cognoscere quaeris Forte meos, referam, quae sunt notissima multis."
_Iliade_ (Livre IX). Salel.
CALYDON
"En Calydon règnoit Oenéus, ung bon Roy qui donnoit De ses beaulx Fruictz chascun an les Primices Aux Immortelz, leur faisant Sacrifices. Or il aduint (ou bien par son uouloir, Ou par oubly) qu'il meit à nonchalloir Diane chaste, et ne luy feit offrande, Dont elle print Indignation grande Encontre luy, et pour bien le punir Feit ung Sanglier dedans ses Champs uenir Horrible et fier qui luy feit grand dommage Tuant les Gens et gastant le Fruictage. Maintz beaulx Pomiers, maintz Arbres reuestuz De Fleur et Fruict, en furent abattuz, Et de la Dent aguisée et poinctue, Le Bléd gasté et la Vigne tortue. Méléager, le Filz de ce bon Roy, Voyant ainsi le piteux Désarroy De son Pays et de sa Gent troublée Proposa lors de faire une Assemblée De bons Veneurs et Leutiers pour chasser L'horrible Beste et sa Mort pourchasser. Ce qui fut faict. Maintes Gens l'y trouvèrent Qui contre luy ses Forces éprouvèrent; Mais à la fin le Sanglier inhumain Receut la Mort de sa Royale Main. Estant occis, deux grandes Nations Pour la Dépouille eurent Contentions Les Curetois disoient la mériter, Ceulx d'Etolie en uouloient hériter."
_Iliade_ (Livre X). Salel.
THE BATHERS
"Quand Ulysses fut en la riche tente Du compaignon, alors il diligente De bien lier ses cheuaulx et les loge Soigneusement dedans la même loge Et au rang même ou la belle monture Du fort Gregeois mangeoit pain et pasture Quand aux habitz de Dolon, il les pose Dedans la nef, sur la poupe et propose En faire ung jour à Pallas sacrifice, Et luy offrir à jamais son seruice Bien tost après, ces deux Grecs de ualeur Se cognoissant oppresséz de chaleur, Et de sueur, dedans la mer entrèrent Pour se lauer, et três bien so frotèrent Le col, le dos, les jambes et les cuisses, Ostant du corps toutes les immondices, Estans ainsi refreichiz et bien netz, Dedans des baingz souefs bien ordonnez, S'en sont entréz, et quand leurs corps Ont esté oinctz d'huyle par le dehors. Puis sont allez manger prians Minerue Qu'en tous leurs faictz les dirige et conserue En respandant du uin à pleine tasse, (pour sacrifice) au milieu de la place."
II. ANDREAS DIVUS
In the year of grace 1906, '08, or '10 I picked from the Paris quais a Latin version of the _Odyssey_ by Andreas Divus Justinopolitanus (Parisiis, In officina Christiani Wecheli, M, D, XXXVIII), the volume containing also the Batrachomyomachia, by Aldus Manutius, and the "Hymni Deorum" rendered by Georgius Dartona Cretensis. I lost a Latin _Iliads_ for the economy of four francs, these coins being at that time scarcer with me than they ever should be with any man of my tastes and abilities.
In 1911 the Italian savant, Signore E. Teza, published his note, "Quale fosse la Casata di Andreas Divus Justinopolitanus?" This question I am unable to answer, nor do I greatly care by what name Andreas was known in the privacy of his life: Signore Dio, Signore Divino, or even Mijnheer van Gott may have served him as patronymic. Sannazaro, author of _De Partu Virginis,_ and also of the epigram ending _hanc et sugere_, translated himself as Sanctus Nazarenus; I am myself known as Signore Sterlina to James Joyce's children, while the phonetic translation of my name into the Japanese tongue is so indecorous that I am seriously advised not to use it, lest it do me harm in Nippon. (Rendered back _ad verbum_ into our maternal speech it gives for its meaning, "This picture of a phallus costs ten yen." There is no surety in shifting personal names from one idiom to another.)
Justinopolis is identified as Capodistria; what matters is Divus' text. We find for the "Nekuia" (_Odys_. xi):
"At postquam ad navem descendimus, et mare, Nauem quidem primum deduximus in mare diuum, Et malum posuimus et vela in navi nigra: Intro autem oues accipientes ire fecimus, intro et ipsi Iuimus dolentes, huberes lachrymas fundentes: Nobis autem a tergo navis nigræ proræ Prosperum ventum imisit pandentem velum bonum amicum Circe benecomata gravis Dea altiloqua. Nos autem arma singula expedientes in navi Sedebamus: hanc autem ventusque gubernatorque dirigebat: Huius at per totum diem extensa sunt vela pontum transientis: Occidit tunc Sol, ombratæ sunt omnes viæ: Hæc autem in fines pervenit profundi Oceani: Illic autem Cimmeriorum virorum populusque civitasque, Caligine et nebula cooperti, neque unquam ipsos Sol lucidus aspicit radiis, Neque quando tendit ad cœlum stellatum, Neque quando retro in terram a cœlo vertitur: Sed nox pernitiosa extenditur miseris hominibus: Navem quidem illuc venientes traximus, extra autem oves Accepimus: ipsi autem rursus apud fluxum Oceani Iuimus, ut in locum perveniremus quem dixit Circe: Hic sacra quidem Perimedes Eurylochusque Faciebant: ego autem ensem acutum trahens a foemore, Foveam fodi quantum cubiti mensura hinc et inde: Circum ipsam autem libamina fundimus omnibus mortuis; Primum mulso, postea autem dulci vino: Tertio rursus aqua, et farinas albas miscui: Multum autem oravi mortuorum infirma capita: Profectus in Ithicam, sterilem bovem, quæ optima esset, Sacrificare in domibus, pyramque implere bonis: Tiresiæ autem seorsum ovem sacrificare vovi Totam nigram, quæ ovibus antecellat nostris: Has autem postquam votis precationibusque gentes mortuorum Precatus sum, oves autem accipiens obtruncavi: In fossam fluebat autem sanguis niger, congregatasque sunt Animæ ex Erebo cadaverum mortuorum, Nymphæque iuvenesque et multa passi senes, Virginesque teneræ, nuper flebilem animum habentes, Multi autem vulnerati æreis lanceis Viri in bello necati, cruenta arma habentes, Qui multi circum foveam veniebant aliunde alius Magno clamore, me autem pallidus timor cepit. Iam postea socios hortans iussi Pecora, quæ iam iacebant iugulata sævo ære, Excoriantes combuere: supplicare autem Diis, Fortique Plutoni, et laudatæ Proserpinæ. At ego ensem acutum trahens a foemore, Sedi, neque permisi mortuorum impotentia capita Sanguinem prope ire, antequam Tiresiam audirem: Prima autem anima Elpenoris venit socii: Nondum enim sepultus erat sub terra lata, Corpus enim in domo Circes reliquimus nos Infletum et insepultum, quoniam labor alius urgebat: Hunc quidem ego lachrymatus sum videns, misertusque sum aio, Et ipsum clamando verba velocia allocutus sum: Elpenor, quomodo venisti sub caliginem obscuram: Prævenisti pedes existens quam ego in navi nigra? Sic dixi: hic autem mini lugens respondit verbo: Nobilis Laertiade, prudens Ulysse, Nocuit mihi dei fatum malum, et multum vinum: Circes autem in domo dormiens, non animadverti Me retrogradum descendere eundo per scalam longam, Sed contra murum cecidi ast autem mihi cervix Nervorum fracta est, anima autem in infernum descendit: Nunc autem his qui venturi sunt postea precor non præsentibus Per uxorem et patrem, qui educavit parvum existentem, Telemachumque quem solum in domibus reliquisti. Scio enim quod hinc iens domo ex inferni Insulam in Æaeam impellens benefabricatam navim: Tunc te postea Rex iubeo recordari mei Ne me infletum, insepultum, abiens retro, relinquas Separatus, ne deorum ira fiam Sed me combure con armis quæcunque mihi sunt, Sepulchramque mihi accumula cani in litore maris, Viri infelicis, et cuius apud posteras fama sit: Hæcque mihi perfice, figeque in sepulchro remum, Quo et vivus remigabam existens cum meis sociis. Sic dixit: at ego ipsum, respondens, allocutus sum: Hæc tibi infelix perficiamque et faciam: Nos quidem sic verbis respondentes molestis Sedebamus: ego quidem seperatim supra sanguinem ensem tenebam: Idolum autem ex altera parte socii multa loquebatur: Venit autem insuper anima matris mortuæ Autolyci filia magnanimi Anticlea, Quam vivam dereliqui iens ad Ilium sacrum, Hac quidem ego lachrymatus sum videns miseratusque sum aio: Sed neque sic sivi priorem licet valde dolens Sanguinem prope ire, antequam Tiresiam audirem: Venit autem insuper anima Thebani Tiresiæ, Aureum sceptrum tenens, me autem novit et allocuta est: Cur iterum o infelix linquens lumen Solis Venisti, ut videas mortuos, et iniucundam regionem? Sed recede a fossa, remove autem ensem acutum, Sanguinem ut bibam, et tibi vera dicam. Sic dixi: ego autem retrocedens, ensem argenteum Vagina inclusi: hic autem postquam bibit sanguinem nigrum, Et tunc iam me verbis allocutus est vates verus: Reditum quæris dulcem illustris Ulysse: Hanc autem tibi difficilem faciet Deus, non enim puto Latere Neptunum, quam iram imposuit animo Iratus, quem ei filium dilectum excæcasti: Sed tamen et sic mala licet passi pervenientis, Si volveris tuum animum continere et sociorum."
The meaning of the passage is, with a few abbreviations, as I have interpolated it in my Third Canto.
"And then went down to the ship, set keel to breakers, Forth on the godly sea, We set up mast and sail on the swart ship, Sheep bore we aboard her, and our bodies also, Heavy with weeping; and winds from sternward Bore us out onward with bellying canvas, Circe's this craft, the trim-coifed goddess. Then sat we amidships--wind jamming the tiller-- Thus with stretched sail we went over sea till day's end. Sun to his slumber, shadows o'er all the ocean, Came we then to the bounds of deepest water, To the Kimmerian lands and peopled cities Covered with close-webbed mist, unpierced ever With glitter of sun-rays, Nor with stars stretched, nor looking back from heaven, Swartest night stretched over wretched men there, The ocean flowing backward, came we then to the place Aforesaid by Circe. Here did they rites, Perimedes and Eurylochus, And drawing sword from my hip I dug the ell-square pitkin, Poured we libations unto each the dead, First mead and then sweet wine, water mixed with white flour, Then prayed I many a prayer to the sickly death's-heads, As set in Ithaca, sterile bulls of the best For sacrifice, heaping the pyre with goods. Sheep, to Tiresias only; black and a bell sheep. Dark blood flowed in the fosse, Souls out of Erebus, cadaverous dead, Of brides, of youths, and of much-bearing old; Virgins tender, souls stained with recent tears, Many men mauled with bronze lance-heads, Battle spoil, bearing yet dreary arms, These many crowded about me, With shouting, pallor upon me, cried to my men for more beasts. Slaughtered the herds, sheep slain of bronze, Poured ointment, cried to the gods, To Pluto the strong, and praised Proserpine, Unsheathed the narrow sword, I sat to keep off the impetuous, impotent dead Till I should hear Tiresias. But first Elpenor came, our friend Elpenor, Unburied, cast on the wide earth, Limbs that we left in the house of Circe, Unwept, unwrapped in sepulchre, since toils urged other. Pitiful spirit, and I cried in hurried speech: 'Elpenor, how art thou come to this dark coast? Cam'st thou a-foot, outstripping seamen?' And he in heavy speech: 'Ill fate and abundant wine! I slept in Circe's ingle, Going down the long ladder unguarded, I fell against the buttress, Shattered the nape-nerve, the soul sought Avernus. But thou, O King, I bid remember me, unwept, unburied, Heap up mine arms, be tomb by sea-board, and inscribed: "_A man of no fortune and with a name to come._" And set my oar up, that I swung mid fellows.' Came then another ghost, whom I beat off, Anticlea, And then Tiresias, Theban, Holding his golden wand, knew me and spoke first: 'Man of ill hour, why come a second time, Leaving the sunlight, facing the sunless dead, and this joyless region? Stand from the fosse, move back, leave me my bloody bever, And I will speak you true speeches.' And I stepped back, Sheathing the yellow sword. Dark blood he drank then, And spoke: 'Lustrous Odysseus Shalt return through spiteful Neptune, over dark seas, Lose all companions.' Foretold me the ways and the signs. Came then Anticlea, to whom I answered: 'Fate drives me on through these deeps. I sought Tiresias,' Told her the news of Troy. And thrice her shadow Faded in my embrace."
It takes no more Latin than I have to know that Divus' Latin is not the Latin of Catullus and Ovid; that it is _illepidus_ to chuck Latin nominative participles about in such profusion; that Romans did not use _habentes_ as the Greeks used _ἔχοντες_, etc. And _nos_ in line 53 is unnecessary. Divus' Latin has, despite these wems, its quality; it is even singable, there are constant suggestions of the poetic motion; it is very simple Latin, after all, and a crib of this sort may make just the difference of permitting a man to read fast enough to get the swing and mood of the subject, instead of losing both in a dictionary.
Even _habentes_ when one has made up one's mind to it, together with less obvious exoticisms, does not upset one as
"the steep of Delphos leaving."
One is, of necessity, more sensitive to botches in one's own tongue than to botches in another, however carefully learned.
For all the fuss about Divus' errors of elegance Samuelis Clarkius and Jo. Augustus Ernestus do not seem to have gone him much better---with two hundred years extra Hellenic scholarship at their disposal.
The first Aldine Greek Iliads appeared I think in 1504, Odyssey possibly later.[4] My edition of Divus is of 1538, and as it contains Aldus' own translation of the Frog-fight, it may indicate that Divus was in touch with Aldus in Italy, or quite possibly the French edition is pirated from an earlier Italian printing. A Latin Odyssey in some sort of verse was at that time infinitely worth doing.
Raphael of Volterra had done a prose Odyssey with the opening lines of several books and a few other brief passages in verse. This was printed with Laurenzo Valla's prose Iliads as early as 1502. He begins:
"Dic mihi musa virum captæ post tempora Troiae Qui mores hominum multorum vidit et urbes Multa quoque et ponto passus dum naufragus errat Ut sibi tum sotiis (sociis) vitam servaret in alto Non tamen hos cupiens fato deprompsit acerbo."
Probably the source of "Master Watson's" English quantitative couplet, but obviously not copied by Divus:
"Virum mihi dic musa multiscium qui valde multum Erravit ex quo Troiae sacram urbem depopulatus est: Multorum autem virorum vidit urbes et mentem cognovit: Multos autem hic in mare passus est dolores, suo in animo, Liberans suamque animam et reditum sociorum."
On the other hand, it is nearly impossible to believe that Clark and Ernestus were unfamiliar with Divus. Clark calls his Latin crib a composite "non elegantem utique et venustam, sed ita Romanam, ut verbis verba." A good deal of Divus' _venustas_ has departed. Clark's hyphenated compounds are, I think, no more Roman than are some of Divus' coinage; they may be a trifle more explanatory, but if we read a shade more of color into _αθέσφατος οἶνος_ than we can into _multum vinum,_ it is not restored to us in Clark's _copiosum vinum_, nor does _terra spatiosa_ improve upon _terra lata, εὐρυδείης_ being (if anything more than _lata_): "with wide ways or streets," the wide ways of the world, traversable, open to wanderers. The participles remain in Clark-Ernestus, many of the coined words remain unchanged. Georgius Dartona gives, in the opening of the second hymn to Aphrodite:
"Venerandam auream coronam habentem pulchram Venerem Canam, quae totius Cypri munimenta sortita est Maritimae ubi illam zephyri vis molliter spirantis Suscitavit per undam multisoni maris, Spuma in molli: hanc autem auricurae Horae Susceperunt hilariter, immortales autem vestes induere: Capite vero super immortali coronam bene constructam posuere Pulchram, auream: tribus autem ansis Donum orichalchi aurique honorabilis: Collum autem molle, ac pectora argentea Monilibus aureis ornabant...." etc.
Ernestus, adding by himself the appendices to the Epics, gives us:
"Venerandam auream coronam habentem pulchram Venerem Canam, quae totius Cypri munimenta sortita est Maritimae, ubi illam zephyri vis molliter spirantis Tulit per undam multisoni maris Spuma in molli: hanc autem auro comam religatae Horae Susceperunt hilariter, immortales autem vestes induere: Caput autem super immortale coronam bene constructam posuere Pulchram, auream, perforatis autem auriculis Donum orichalci preciosi: Collum autem molle ac pectora Candida[5] Monilibus aureis ornabant...." etc.
"Which things since they are so" lead us to feel that we would have had no less respect for Messrs. Clarkius and Ernestus if they had deigned to mention the names of their predecessors. They have not done this in their prefaces, and if any mention is made of the sixteenth-century scholars, it is very effectually buried somewhere in the voluminous Latin notes, which I have not gone through _in toto_. Their edition (Glasgow, 1814) is, however, most serviceable.
TRANSLATION OF AESCHYLUS
A search for Aeschylus in English is deadly, accursed, mind-rending. Browning has "done" the Agamemnon, or "done the Agamemnon in the eye" as the critic may choose to consider. He has written a modest and an apparently intelligent preface:
"I should hardly look for an impossible transmission of the reputed magniloquence and sonority of the Greek; and this with the less regret, inasmuch as there is abundant musicality elsewhere, but nowhere else than in his poem the ideas of the poet."
He quotes Matthew Arnold on the Greeks: "their expression is so excellent, because it is so simple and so well subordinated, because it draws its force directly from the pregnancy of the matter which it conveys ... not a word wasted, not a sentiment capriciously thrown in, stroke on stroke."
He is reasonable about the Greek spelling. He points out that _γόνον ἰδὼν κάλλιστον ἀνδρῶν_ sounds very poorly as "Seeing her son the fairest of men" but is outshouted in "Remirando il figliuolo bellissimo degli uomini," and protests his fidelity to the meaning of Aeschylus.
His weakness in this work is where it essentially lay in all of his expression, it rests in the term "ideas"--"Thought" as Browning understood it--"ideas" as the term is current, are poor two dimensional stuff, a scant, scratch covering. "Damn ideas, anyhow." An idea is only an imperfect induction from fact.
The solid, the "last atom of force verging off into the first atom of matter" is the force, the emotion, the objective sight of the poet. In the Agamemnon it is the whole rush of the action, the whole wildness of Kassandra's continual shrieking, the flash of the beacon fires burning unstinted wood, the outburst of
_Τροιάν Αχαιῶν οὖσαν_,
or the later
_Τροίαν Ἀχαιοὶ τήδ' ἔχουσ' ἐν ἡπέρα._
"Troy is the greeks'." Even Rossetti has it better than Browning: "Troy's down, tall Troy's on fire," anything, literally anything that can be shouted, that can be shouted uncontrolledly and hysterically. "Troy is the Greeks'" is an ambiguity for the ear. "Know that our men are in Ilion."
Anything but a stilted unsayable jargon. Yet with Browning we have
"Troia the Achaioi hold," and later,
"Troia do the Achaioi hold," followed by:
"this same day I think a noise--no mixture--reigns i' the city Sour wine and unguent pour thou in one vessel--"
And it does not end here. In fact it reaches the nadir of its bathos in a later speech of Klutaimnestra in the line
"The perfect man his home perambulating!"
We may add several exclamation points to the one which Mr. Browning has provided. But then all translation is a thankless, or is at least most apt to be a thankless and desolate undertaking.
What Browning had not got into his sometimes excellent top-knot was the patent, or what should be the patent fact that inversions of sentence order in an uninflected language like English are not, simply and utterly _are not_ any sort of equivalent for inversions and perturbations of order in a language inflected as Greek and Latin are inflected. That is the chief source of his error. In these inflected languages order has other currents than simple sequence of subject, predicate, object; and all sorts of departures from this Franco-English natural position are in Greek and Latin neither confusing nor delaying; they may be both simple and emphatic, they do not obstruct one's apperception of the verbal relations.
Obscurities _not inherent in_ the matter, obscurities due not to the thing but to the wording, are a botch, and are _not_ worth preserving in a translation. The work lives not by them but despite them.
Rossetti is in this matter sounder than Browning, when he says that the only thing worth bringing over is the beauty of the original; and despite Rossetti's purple plush and molasses trimmings he meant by "beauty" something fairly near what we mean by the "emotional intensity" of his original.
Obscurities inherent in the thing occur when the author is piercing, or trying to pierce into, uncharted regions; when he is trying to express things not yet current, not yet worn into phrase; when he is ahead of the emotional, or philosophic sense (as a painter might be ahead of the color-sense) of his contemporaries.
As for the word-sense and phrase-sense, we still hear workmen and peasants and metropolitan bus-riders repeating the simplest sentences three and four times, back and forth between interlocutors: trying to get the sense "I sez to Bill, I'm goin' to 'Arrow" or some other such subtlety from one occiput into another.
"You sez to Bill, etc."
"Yus, I sez ... etc."
"O!"
The first day's search at the Museum reveals "Aeschylus" printed by Aldus in 1518; by Stephanus in 1557, no English translation before 1777, a couple in the 1820's, more in the middle of the century, since 1880 past counting, and no promising names in the list. Sophocles falls to Jebb and does not appear satisfactory.
From which welter one returns thankfully to the Thomas Stanley Greek and Latin edition, with Saml. Butler's notes, Cambridge, "typis ac sumptibus academicis." 1811--once a guinea or half a guinea per volume, half leather, but now mercifully, since people no longer read Latin, picked up at 2s. for the set (eight volumes in all), rather less than the price of their postage. Quartos in excellent type.
Browning shows himself poet in such phrases as "dust, mud's thirsty brother," which is easy, perhaps, but is English, even Browning's own
## particular English, as "dust, of mud brother thirsty," would not be
English at all; and if I have been extremely harsh in dealing with the first passage quoted it is still undisputable that I have read Browning off and on for seventeen years with no small pleasure and admiration, and am one of the few people who know anything about his Sordello, and have never read his Agamemnon, have not even now when it falls into a special study been able to get through his Agamemnon.
Take another test passage:
Οὖτός ἐσιν Αγαμέμνων, ἐμὸς Πόσις, νεκρὸς δέ τῆσδε δεξιᾶς χερός Ἔργον δικαίνας τέκτονος. Τάδ' ὦδ ἔχει. 1445
"Hicce est Agamemnon, maritus Meus, hac dextra mortuus, Facinus justae artificis. Haec ita se habent."
We turn to Browning and find:
"--this man is Agamemnon, My husband, dead, the work of this right hand here, Aye, of a just artificer: so things are."
To the infinite advantage of the Latin, and the complete explanation of why Browning's Aeschylus, to say nothing of forty other translations of Aeschylus, is unreadable.
Any bungling translation:
"This is Agamemnon, My husband, Dead by this hand, And a good job. These, gentlemen, are the facts."
No, that is extreme, but the point is that any natural wording, anything which keeps the mind off theatricals and on Klutaimnestra actual, dealing with an actual situation, and not pestering the reader with frills and festoons of language, is worth all the convoluted tushery that the Victorians can heap together.
I can conceive no improvement on the Latin, it saves by _dextra_ for _δεξιᾶς χερός_, it loses a few letters in "se habent," but it has the same drive as the Greek.
The Latin can be a whole commentary on the Greek, or at least it can give one the whole parsing and order, and let one proceed at a comforable rate with but the most rudimentary knowledge of the original language. And I do not think this a trifle; it would be an ill day if men again let the classics go by the board; we should fall into something worse than, or as bad as, the counter-reformation: a welter of gum-shoes, and cocoa, and Y.M.C.A. and Webbs, and social theorizing committees, and the general hell of a groggy doctrinaire obfuscation; and the very disagreeablizing of the classics, every pedagogy which puts the masterwork further from us, either by obstructing the schoolboy, or breeding affectation in dilettante readers, works toward such a detestable end. I do not know that strict logic will cover all of the matter, or that I can formulate anything beyond a belief that we test a translation by the feel, and particularly by the feel of being in contact with the force of a great original, and it does not seem to me that one can open this Latin text of the Agamemnon without getting such sense of contact:
"Mox sciemus lampadum luciferarum 498 Signorumque per faces et ignis vices, An vere sint, an somniorum instar, Gratum veniens illud lumen eluserit animum nostrum. Praeconem hunc a littore video obumbratum Ramis olivae: testatur autem haec mihi frater Luti socius aridus pulvis, Quod neque mutus, neque accendens facem Materiae montanae signa dabit per fumum ignis."
or
"Apollo, Apollo! 1095 Agyieu Apollo mi! Ah! quo me tandem duxisti? ad qualem domum? * * * * * "Heu, heu, ecce, ecce, cohibe a vacca 1134 Taurum: vestibus involens Nigricornem machina Percutit; cadit vero in aquali vase. Insidiosi lebetis casum ut intelligas velim. * * * * * Heu, heu, argutae lusciniae fatum _mihi tribuis_: * * * * * "Heu nuptiae, nuptiae Paridis exitiales 1165 Amicis! eheu Scamandri patria unda!"
All this howling of Kassandra comes at one from the page, and the grimness also of the Iambics:
"Ohime! lethali intus percussus sum vulnere." 1352 "Tace: quis clamat vulnus lethaliter vulneratus?" "Ohime! iterum secundo ictu sauciatus." "Patrari facinus mihi videtur regis ex ejulatu. 1355 "At tuta communicemus consilia." "Ego quidem vobis meam dico sententiam," etc.
Here or in the opening of the play, or where you like in this Latin, we are at once in contact with the action, something real is going on, we are keen and curious on the instant, but I cannot get any such impact from any part of the Browning.
"In bellum nuptam, Auctricem que contentionum, Helenam: 695 Quippe quae congruenter Perditrix navium, perditrix virorum, perditrix urbium, E delicatis Thalami ornamentis navigavit Zephyri terrigenae aura. Et numerosi scutiferi, Venatores secundum vestigia, Remorum inapparentia Appulerunt ad Simoentis ripas Foliis abundantes Ob jurgium cruentum."
"War-wed, author of strife, Fitly Helen, destroyer of ships, of men, Destroyer of cities, From delicate-curtained room Sped by land breezes.
"Swift the shields on your track, Oars on the unseen traces, And leafy Simois Gone red with blood."[6]
Contested Helen, _Ἀμφινεικῆ_.
"War-wed, contested, (Fitly) Helen, destroyer of ships; of men; Destroyer of cities,
"From the delicate-curtained room Sped by land breezes.
"Swift on the shields on your track, Oars on the unseen traces.
"Red leaves in Simois!"
"Rank flower of love, for Troy."
"Quippe leonem educavit.... 726 Mansuetum, pueris amabilem.... ... divinitus sacerdos Ates (i.e. Paris) In aedibus enutritus est.
"Statim igitur venit 746 Ad urbem Ilii, Ut ita dicam, animus Tranquillae serenitatis, placidum Divitiarum ornamentum Blandum oculourum telum, Animum pungens flos amoris (_Helena_) accubitura. Perfecit autem Nuptiarum acerbos exitus, Mala vicina, malaque socia, Irruens in Priamidas, Ductu Jovis Hospitalis, Erinnys luctuosa sponsis."
It seems to me that English translators have gone wide in two ways, first in trying to keep every adjective, when obviously many adjectives in the original have only melodic value, secondly they have been deaved with syntax; have wasted time, involved their English, trying first to evolve a definite logical structure for the Greek and secondly to preserve it, _and all its grammatical relations,_ in English.
One might almost say that Aeschylus' Greek is agglutinative, that his general drive, especially in choruses, is merely to remind the audience of the events of the Trojan war; that syntax is subordinate, and duly subordinated, left out, that he is not austere, but often even verbose after a fashion (not Euripides' fashion).
A reading version might omit various things which would be of true service only if the English were actually to be sung on a stage, or chanted to the movements of the choric dance or procession.
Above suggestions should _not_ be followed with intemperance. But certainly more sense and less syntax (good or bad) in translations of Aeschylus might be a relief.
Chor. Anapest:
"O iniquam Helenam, una quae multas, 1464 Multas admodum animas Perdidisti ad Trojam! Nunc vero nobilem memorabilem _(Agam. animam),_ Deflorasti per caedem inexpiabilem. Talis erat tunc in aedibus Eris viri domitrix aerumna."
Clytemnestra:
"Nequaquam mortis sortem exopta 1470 Hisce gravatus; Neque in Helenam iram convertas, Tanquam viriperdam, ac si una multorum Virorum animas Graecorum perdens, Intolerabilem dolorem effecerit." * * * * *
Clytemnestra:
"Mortem haud indignam arbitrar 1530 Huic contigisse: Neque enim ille insidiosam cladem Aedibus intulit; sed meum ex ipso Germen sublatum, multum defletam Iphigeniam cum indigne affecerit, Digna passus est, nihil in inferno Glorietur, gladio inflicta Morte luens quae prior perpetravit."
"Death not unearned, nor yet a novelty in this house; Let him make talk in hell concerning Iphigenia."
(If we allow the last as ironic equivalent of the literal "let him not boast in hell.")
"He gets but a thrust once given (by him) Back-pay, for Iphigenia."
One can further condense the English but at the cost of obscurity.
Morshead is bearable in Clytemnestra's description the beacons.
"From Ida's top Hephaestos, Lord of fire, Sent forth his sign, and on, and ever on, Beacon to beacon sped tjie courier-flame From Ida to the crag, that Hermes loves On Lemnos; thence into the steep sublime Of Athos, throne of Zeus, the broad blaze flared. Thence, raised aloft to shoot across the sea The moving light, rejoicing in its strength Sped from the pyre of pine, and urged its way, In golden glory, like some strange new sun, Onward and reached Macistus' watching heights."
[1] Milton, of course, whom my detractors say I condemn without due circumspection.
[2] _I.e._ Clark is "correct," but the words shade differently. _Ἠκα_ means low, quiet, with a secondary meaning of "little by little."-_Submisse_ means low, quiet, with a secondary meaning of modesty, humbly.
[3] Later continued by l'Abbé de St. Chérroi.
[4] My impression is that I saw an Iliad by Andreas Divus on the Quais in Paris, at the time I found his version of the Odyssey, but an impression of this sort is, after eight years, untrustworthy, it may have been only a Latin Iliad in similar binding.
[5] Reading _ἀργυφέοισιν_, variant _ἀργυρέοισιν_, offered in footnote. In any case _argentea_ is closer than _candida_.
[6] "H.D.'s" translations from Euripides should be mentioned either here or in connection with "The New Poetry"; she has obtained beautiful strophes for First Chorus of Iphigenia in Aulis, 1-4 and 9, and for the first of the second chorus. Elsewhere she retains certain needless locutions, and her versification permits too many dead stops in its current.
IX
THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER AS A MEDIUM FOR POETRY
BY ERNEST FENOLLOSA
[_This essay was practically finished by the late Ernest Fenollosa; I have done little more than remove a few repetitions and shape a few sentences._
_We have here not a bare philological discussion, but a study of the fundamentals of all æsthetics. In his search through unknown art Fenollosa, coming upon unknown motives and principles unrecognised in the West, was already led into many modes of thought since fruitful in "new" western painting and poetry. He was a forerunner without knowing it and without being known, as such._
_He discerned principles of writing which he had scarcely time to put into practice. In Japan he restored, or greatly helped to restore, a respect for the native art. In America and Europe he cannot be looked upon as a mere searcher after exotics. His mind was constantly filled with parallels and comparisons between eastern and western art. To him the exotic was always a means of fructification. He looked to an American renaissance. The vitality of his outlook can be judged from the fact that although this essay was written some time before his death in 1908 have not had to change the allusions to western conditions. The later movements in art have corroborated his theories_.--EZRA POUND.]
This twentieth century not only turns a new page in the book of the world, but opens another and a startling chapter. Vistas of strange futures unfold for man, of world-embracing cultures half weaned from Europe, of hitherto undreamed responsibilities for nations and races.
The Chinese problem alone is so vast that no nation can afford to ignore it. We in America, especially, must face it across the Pacific, and master it or it will master us. And the only way to master it is to strive with patient sympathy to understand the best, the most hopeful and the most human elements in it.
It is unfortunate that England and America have so long ignored or mistaken the deeper problems of Oriental culture. We have misconceived the Chinese for a materialistic people, for a debased and worn-out race. We have belittled the Japanese as a nation of copyists. We have stupidly assumed that Chinese history affords no glimpse of change in social evolution, no salient epoch of moral and spiritual crisis. We have denied the essential humanity of these peoples; and we have toyed with their ideals as if they were no better than comic songs in an "opera bouffe."
The duty that faces us is not to batter down their forts or to exploit their markets, but to study and to come to sympathize with their humanity and their generous aspirations. Their type of cultivation has been high. Their harvest of recorded experience doubles our own. The Chinese have been idealists, and experimenters in the making of great principles; their history opens a world of lofty aim and achievement, parallel to that of the ancient Mediterranean peoples. We need their best ideals to supplement our own--ideals enshrined in their art, in their literature and in the tragedies of their lives.
We have already seen proof of the vitality and practical value of oriental painting for ourselves and as a key to the eastern soul. It may be worth while to approach their literature, the intensest part of it, their poetry, even in an imperfect manner.
I feel that I should perhaps apologize[1] for presuming to follow that series of brilliant scholars, Davis, Legge, St. Denys and Giles, who have treated the subject of Chinese poetry with a wealth of erudition to which I can proffer no claim. It is not as a professional linguist nor as a sinologue that I humbly put forward what I have to say. As an enthusiastic student of beauty in Oriental culture, having spent a large portion of my years in close relation with Orientals, I could not but breathe in something of the poetry incarnated in their lives.
I have been for the most part moved to my temerity by personal considerations. An unfortunate belief has spread both in England and in America that Chinese and Japanese poetry are hardly more than an amusement, trivial, childish, and not to be reckoned in the world's serious literary performance. I have heard well-known sinologues state that, save for the purposes of professional linguistic scholarship, these branches of poetry are fields too barren to repay the toil necessary for their cultivation.
Now my own impression has been so radically and diametrically opposed to such a conclusion, that a sheer enthusiasm of generosity has driven me to wish to share with other Occidentals my newly discovered joy. Either I am pleasingly self-deceived in my positive delight, or else there must be some lack of æsthetic sympathy and of poetic feeling in the accepted methods of presenting the poetry of China. I submit my causes of joy.
Failure or success in presenting any alien poetry in English must depend largely upon poetic workmanship in the chosen medium. It was perhaps too much to expect that aged scholars who had spent their youth in gladiatorial combats with the refractory Chinese characters should succeed also as poets. Even Greek verse might have fared equally ill had its purveyors been perforce content with provincial standards of English rhyming. Sinologues should remember that the purpose of poetical translation is the poetry, not the verbal definitions in dictionaries.
One modest merit I may, perhaps, claim for my work: it represents for the first time a Japanese school of study in Chinese culture. Hitherto Europeans have been somewhat at the mercy of contemporary Chinese scholarship. Several centuries ago China lost much of her creative self, and of her insight into the causes of her own life, but her original spirit still lives, grows, interprets, transferred to Japan in all its original freshness. The Japanese to-day represent a stage of culture roughly corresponding to that of China under the Sung dynasty. I have been fortunate in studying for many years as a private pupil under Professor Kainan Mori, who is probably the greatest living authority on Chinese poetry. He has recently been called to a chair in the Imperial University of Tokio.
My subject is poetry, not language, yet the roots of poetry are in language. In the study of a language so alien in form to ours as is Chinese in its written character, it is necessary to inquire how those universal elements of form which constitute poetics can derive appropriate nutriment.
In what sense can verse, written in terms of visible hieroglyphics, be reckoned true poetry? It might seem that poetry, which like music is a _time art_, weaving its unities out of successive impressions of sound, could with difficulty assimilate a verbal medium consisting largely of semi-pictorial appeals to the eye. Contrast, for example, Gray's line:
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day
with the Chinese line:
[Illustration: Chinese ideograms. Moon rays like pure snow.]
Unless the sound of the latter be given, what have they in common? It is not enough to adduce that each contains a certain body of prosaic meaning; for the question is, how can the Chinese line imply, _as form_, the very element that distinguishes poetry from prose?
On second glance, it is seen that the Chinese words, though visible, occur in just as necessary an order as the phonetic symbols of Gray. All that poetic form requires is a regular and flexible sequence, as plastic as thought itself. The characters may be seen and read, silently by the eye, one after the other:
Moon rays like pure snow.
Perhaps we do not always sufficiently consider that thought is successive, not through some accident or weakness of our subjective operations but because the operations of nature are successive. The transferences of force from agent to object which constitute natural phenomena, occupy time. Therefore, a reproduction of them in imagination requires the same temporal order.[2]
Suppose that we look out of a window and watch a man. Suddenly he turns his head and actively fixes his attention upon something. We look ourselves and see that his vision has been focussed upon a horse. We saw, first, the man before he acted; second, while he acted; third, the object toward which his action was directed. In speech we split up the rapid continuity of this action and of its picture into its three essential parts or joints in the right order, and say:
Man sees horse.
It is clear that these three joints, or words, are only three phonetic symbols, which stand for the three terms of a natural process. But we could quite as easily denote these three stages of our thought by symbols equally arbitrary, _which had no basis in sound_; for example, by three Chinese characters:
[Illustration: Chinese ideograms]
If we all knew _what division_ of this mental horse-picture each of these signs stood for, we could communicate continuous thought to one another as easily by drawing them as by speaking words. We habitually employ the visible language of gesture in much this same manner.
But Chinese notation is something much more than arbitrary symbols. It is based upon a vivid shorthand picture of the operations of nature. In the algebraic figure and in the spoken word there is no natural connection between thing and sign: all depends upon sheer convention. But the Chinese method follows natural suggestion. First stands the man on his two legs. Second, his eye moves through space: a bold figure represented by running legs under an eye, a modified picture of an eye, a modified picture of running legs but unforgettable once you have seen it. Third stands the horse on his four legs.
The thought picture is not only called up by these signs as well as by words but far more vividly and concretely. Legs belong to all three characters: they are _alive_. The group holds something of the quality of a continuous moving picture.
The untruth of a painting or a photograph is that, in spite of its concreteness, it drops the element of natural succession.
Contrast the Laocoon statue with Browning's lines:
"I sprang to the saddle, and Jorris, and he * * * * * * And into the midnight we galloped abreast."
One superiority of verbal poetry as an art rests in its getting back to the fundamental reality of _time_. Chinese poetry has the unique advantage of combining both elements. It speaks at once with the vividness of painting, and with the mobility of sounds. It is, in some sense, more objective than either, more dramatic. In reading Chinese we do not seem to be juggling mental counters, but to be watching _things_ work out their own fate.
Leaving for a moment the form of the sentence, let us look more closely at this quality of vividness in the structure of detached Chinese words. The earlier forms of these characters were pictorial, and their hold upon the imagination is little shaken, even in later conventional modifications. It is not so well known, perhaps, that the great number of these ideographic roots carry in them a _verbal idea of action_. It might be thought that a picture is naturally the picture of a _thing_, and that therefore the root ideas of Chinese are what grammar calls nouns.
But examination shows that a large number of the primitive Chinese characters, even the so-called radicals, are shorthand pictures of
## actions or processes.
For example, the ideograph meaning "to speak" is a mouth with two words and a flame coming out of it. The sign meaning "to grow up with difficulty" is grass with a twisted root. But this concrete _verb_ quality, both in nature and in the Chinese signs, becomes far more striking and poetic when we pass from such simple, original pictures to compounds. In this process of compounding, two things added together do not produce a third thing but suggest some fundamental relation between them. For example, the ideograph for a "mess-mate" is a man and a fire.
A true noun, an isolated thing, does not exist in nature. Things are only the terminal points, or rather the meeting points of actions, cross-sections cut through actions, snap-shots. Neither can a pure verb, an abstract motion, be possible in nature. The eye sees noun and verb as one: things in motion, motion in things, and so the Chinese conception tends to represent them.
The sun underlying the bursting forth of plants = spring.
The sun sign tangled in the branches of the tree sign = east.
"Rice-field" plus "struggle" = male.
"Boat" plus "water," boat-water, a ripple.
Let us return to the form of the sentence and see what power it adds to the verbal units from which it builds. I wonder how many people have asked themselves why the sentence form exists at all, why it seems so universally necessary _in all languages_? Why _must_ all possess it, and what is the normal type of it? If it be so universal it ought to correspond to some primary law of nature.
I fancy the professional grammarians have given but a lame response to this inquiry. Their definitions fall into two types: one, that a sentence expresses a "complete thought"; the other, that in it we bring about a union of subject and predicate.
The former has the advantage of trying for some natural objective standard, since it is evident that a thought can not be the test of its own completeness. But in nature there is _no_ completeness. On the one hand, practical completeness may be expressed by a mere interjection, as "Hi! there!", or "Scat!", or even by shaking one's fist. No sentence is needed to make one's meaning more clear. On the other hand, no full sentence really completes a thought. The man who sees and the horse which is seen will not stand still. The man was planning a ride before he looked. The horse kicked when the man tried to catch him. The truth is that acts are successive, even continuous; one causes or passes into another. And though we may string never so many clauses into a single compound sentence, motion leaks everywhere, like electricity from an exposed wire. All processes in nature are inter-related; and thus there could be no complete sentence (according to this definition) save one which it would take all time to pronounce.
In the second definition of the sentence, as "uniting a subject and a predicate," the grammarian falls back on pure subjectivity. _We_ do it all; it is a little private juggling between our right and left hands. The subject is that about which _I_ am going to talk; the predicate is that which _I_ am going to say about it. The sentence according to this definition is not an attribute of nature but an accident of man as a conversational animal.
If it were really so, then there could be no possible test of the truth of a sentence. Falsehood would be as specious as verity. Speech would carry no conviction.
Of course this view of the grammarians springs from the discredited, or rather the useless, logic of the middle ages. According to this logic, thought deals with abstractions, concepts drawn out of things by a sifting process. These logicians never inquired how the "qualities" which they pulled out of things came to be there. The truth of all their little checker-board juggling depended upon the natural order by which these powers or properties or qualities were folded in concrete things, yet they despised the "thing" as a mere "particular," or pawn. It was as if Botany should reason from the leaf-patterns woven into our table-cloths. Valid scientific thought consists in following as closely as may be the actual and entangled lines of forces as they pulse through things. Thought deals with no bloodless concepts but watches _things move_ under its microscope.
The sentence form was forced upon primitive men by nature itself. It was not we who made it; it was a reflection of the temporal order in causation. All truth has to be expressed in sentences because all truth is the _transference of power_. The type of sentence in nature is a flash of lightning. It passes between two terms, a cloud and the earth. No unit of natural process can be less than this. All natural processes are, in their units, as much as this. Light, heat, gravity, chemical affinity, human will have this in common, that they redistribute force. Their unit of process can be represented as:
term transference term from of to which force which
If we regard this transference as the conscious or unconscious act of an agent we can translate the diagram into:
agent act object
In this the act is the very substance of the fact denoted. The agent and the object are only limiting terms.
It seems to me that the normal and typical sentence in English as well as in Chinese expresses just this unit of natural process. It consists of three necessary words; the first denoting the agent or subject from which the act starts; the second embodying the very stroke of the act; the third pointing to the object, the receiver of the impact. Thus:
Farmer pounds rice.
The form of the Chinese transitive sentence, and of the English (omitting particles) exactly corresponds to this universal form of
## action in nature. This brings language close to _things_, and in its
strong reliance upon verbs it erects all speech into a kind of dramatic poetry.
A different sentence order is frequent in inflected languages like Latin, German or Japanese. This is because they are inflected, i.e., they have little tags and word-endings, or labels to show which is the agent, the object, etc. In uninflected languages, like English and Chinese, there is nothing but the order of the words to distinguish their functions. And this order would be no sufficient indication, were it not the _natural order_--that is, the order of cause and effect.
It is true that there are, in language, intransitive and passive forms, sentences built out of the verb "to be," and, finally, negative forms. To grammarians and logicians these have seemed more primitive than the transitive, or at least exceptions to the transitive. I had long suspected that these apparently exceptional forms had grown from the transitive or worn away from it by alteration or modification. This view is confirmed by Chinese examples, wherein it is still possible to watch the transformation going on.
The intransitive form derives from the transitive by dropping a generalized, customary, reflexive or cognate object. "He runs (a race)." "The sky reddens (itself)." "We breathe (air)." Thus we get weak and incomplete sentences which suspend the picture and lead us to think of some verbs as denoting states rather than acts. Outside grammar the word "state" would hardly be recognized as scientific. Who can doubt that when we say, "The wall shines," we mean that it actively reflects light to our eye?
The beauty of Chinese verbs is that they are all transitive or intransitive at pleasure. There is no such thing as a naturally intransitive verb. The passive form is evidently a correlative sentence, which turns about and makes the object into a subject. That the object is not in itself passive, but contributes some positive force of its own to the action, is in harmony both with scientific law and with ordinary experience. The English passive voice with "is" seemed at first an obstacle to this hypothesis, but one suspected that the true form was a generalized transitive verb meaning something like "receive," which had degenerated into an auxiliary. It was a delight to find this the case in Chinese.
In nature there are no negations, no possible transfers of negative force. The presence of negative sentences in language would seem to corroborate the logicians' view that assertion is an arbitrary subjective act. _We_ can assert a negation, though nature can not. But here again science comes to our aid against the logician: all apparently negative or disruptive movements bring into play other positive forces. It requires great effort to annihilate. Therefore we should suspect that, if we could follow back the history of all negative particles, we should find that they also are sprung from transitive verbs. It is too late to demonstrate such derivations in the Aryan languages, the clue has been lost, but in Chinese we can still watch positive verbal conceptions passing over into so-called negatives. Thus in Chinese the sign meaning "to be lost in the forest" relates to a State of non-existence. English "not" = the Sanskrit _na,_ which may come from the root _na_, to be lost, to perish.
Lastly comes the infinitive which substitutes for a specific colored verb the universal copula "is," followed by a noun or an adjective. We do not say a tree "greens itself," but "the tree is green;" not that "monkeys bring forth live young," but that "the monkey is a mammal." This is an ultimate weakness of language. It has come from generalizing all intransitive words into one. As "live," "see," "walk," "breathe," are generalized into states by dropping their objects, so these weak verbs are in turn reduced to the abstractest state of all, namely, bare existence.
There is in reality no such verb as a pure copula, no such original conception, our very word _exist_ means "to stand forth," to show oneself by a definite act. "Is" comes from the Aryan root _as_, to breathe. "Be" is from _bhu_, to grow.
In Chinese the chief verb for "is" not only means actively "to have," but shows by its derivation that it expresses something even more concrete, namely, "to snatch from the moon with the hand." Here the baldest symbol of prosaic analysis is transformed by magic into a splendid flash of concrete poetry.
I shall not have entered vainly into this long analysis of the sentence if I have succeeded in showing how poetical is the Chinese form and how close to nature. In translating Chinese, verse especially, we must hold as closely as possible to the concrete force of the original, eschewing adjectives, nouns and intransitive forms wherever we can, and seeking instead strong and individual verbs.
Lastly we notice that the likeness of form between Chinese and English sentences renders translation from one to the other exceptionally easy. The genius of the two is much the same. Frequently it is possible by omitting English particles to make a literal word-for-word translation which will be not only intelligible in English, but even the strongest and most poetical English. Here, however, one must follow closely what is said, not merely what is abstractly meant.
Let us go back from the Chinese sentence to the individual written word. How are such words to be classified? Are some of them nouns by nature, some verbs and some adjectives? Are there pronouns, and prepositions and conjunctions in Chinese as in good Christian languages?
One is led to suspect from an analysis of the Aryan languages that such differences are not natural, and that they have been unfortunately invented by grammarians to confuse the simple poetic outlook on life. All nations have written their strongest and most vivid literature before they invented a grammar. Moreover, all Aryan etymology points back to roots which are the equivalents of simple Sanskrit verbs, such as we find tabulated at the back of our Skeat. Nature herself has no grammar.[3] Fancy picking up a man and telling him that he is a noun, a dead thing rather than a bundle of functions! A "part of speech" is only _what it does_. Frequently our lines of cleavage fail, one part of speech acts for another. They _act for_ one another because they were originally one and the same.
Few of us realize that in our own language these very differences once grew up in living articulation; that they still retain life. It is only when the difficulty of placing some odd term arises or when we are forced to translate into some very different language, that we attain for a moment the inner heat of thought, a heat which melts down the parts of speech to recast them at will.
One of the most interesting facts about the Chinese language is that in it we can see, not only the forms of sentences, but literally the parts of speech growing up, budding forth one from another. Like nature, the Chinese words are alive and plastic, because _thing_ and _action_ are not formally separated. The Chinese language naturally knows no grammar. It is only lately that foreigners, European and Japanese, have begun to torture this vital speech by forcing it to fit the bed of their definitions. We import into our reading of Chinese all the weakness of our own formalisms. This is especially sad in poetry, because the one necessity, even in our own poetry, is to keep words as flexible as possible, as full of the sap of nature.
Let us go further with our example. In English we call "to shine" a _verb in the infinitive_, because it gives the abstract meaning of the verb without conditions. If we want a corresponding adjective we take a different word, "bright." If we need a noun we say "luminosity," which is abstract, being derived from an adjective.[4] To get a tolerably concrete noun, we have to leave behind the verb and adjective roots, and light upon a thing arbitrarily cut off from its power of action, say "the sun" or "the moon." Of course there is nothing in nature so cut off, and therefore this nounizing is itself an abstraction. Even if we did have a common word underlying at once the verb "shine," the adjective "bright" and the noun "sun," we should probably call it an "infinitive of the infinitive." According to our ideas, it should be something extremely abstract, too intangible for use.
The Chinese have one word, _ming_ or _mei_. Its ideograph is the sign of the sun together with the sign of the moon. It serves as verb, noun, adjective. Thus you write literally, "the sun and moon of the cup" for "the cup's brightness." Placed as a verb, you write "the cup sun-and-moons," actually "cup sun-and-moon," or in a weakened thought, "is like sun," i.e., shines. "Sun-and-moon cup" is naturally a bright cup. There is no possible confusion of the real meaning, though a stupid scholar may spend a week trying to decide what "part of speech" he should use in translating a very simple and direct thought from Chinese to English.
The fact is that almost every written Chinese word is properly just such an underlying word, and yet it is _not_ abstract. It is not exclusive of parts of speech, but comprehensive; not something which is neither a noun, verb, or adjective, but something which is all of them at once and at all times. Usage may incline the full meaning now a little more to one side, now to another, according to the point of view, but through all cases the poet is free to deal with it richly and concretely, as does nature.
In the derivation of nouns from verbs, the Chinese language is forestalled by the Aryan. Almost all the Sanskrit roots, which seem to underlie European languages, are primitive verbs, which express characteristic actions of visible nature. The verb must be the primary fact of nature, since motion and change are all that we can recognize in her. In the primitive transitive sentence, such as "Farmer pounds rice," the agent and the object are nouns only in so far as they limit a unit of action. "Farmer" and "rice" are mere hard terms which define the extremes of the pounding. But in themselves, apart from this sentence-function, they are naturally verbs. The farmer is one who tills the ground, and the rice is a plant which grows in a special way. This is indicated in the Chinese characters. And this probably exemplifies the ordinary derivation of nouns from verbs. In all languages, Chinese included, a noun is originally "that which does something," that which performs the verbal action. Thus the moon comes from the root _ma_, and means "the measurer." The sun means that which begets.
The derivation of adjectives from the verb need hardly be exemplified. Even with us, to-day, we can still watch participles passing over into adjectives. In Japanese the adjective is frankly part of the inflection of the verb, a special mood, so that every verb is also an adjective. This brings us close to nature, because everywhere the quality is only a power of action regarded as having an abstract inherence. Green is only a certain rapidity of vibration, hardness a degree of tenseness in cohering. In Chinese the adjective always retains a substratum of verbal meaning. We should try to render this in translation, not be content with some bloodless adjectival abstraction plus "is."
Still more interesting are the Chinese "prepositions," they are often post-positions. Prepositions are so important, so pivotal in European speech only because we have weakly yielded up the force of our intransitive verbs. We have to add small supernumerary words to bring back the original power. We still say "I see a horse," but with the weak verb "look," we have to add the directive particle "at" before we can restore the natural transitiveness.[5]
Prepositions represent a few simple ways in which incomplete verbs complete themselves. Pointing toward nouns as a limit they bring force to bear upon them. That is to say, they are naturally verbs, of generalized or condensed use. In Aryan languages it is often difficult to trace the verbal origins of simple prepositions. Only in "_off_" do we see a fragment of the thought "to throw off." In Chinese the preposition is frankly a verb, specially used in a generalized sense. These verbs are often used in their specially verbal sense, and it greatly weakens an English translation if they are systematically rendered by colorless prepositions.
Thus in Chinese: By = to cause; to = to fall toward; in = to remain, to dwell; from = to follow; and so on.
Conjunctions are similarly derivative, they usually serve to mediate
## actions between verbs, and therefore they are necessarily themselves
## actions. Thus in Chinese: Because = to use; and = to be included under
one; another form of "and" = to be parallel; or = to partake; if = to let one do, to permit. The same is true of a host of other particles, no longer traceable in the Aryan tongues.
Pronouns appear a thorn in our evolution theory, since they have been taken as unanalyzable expressions of personality. In Chinese even they yield up their striking secrets of verbal metaphor. They are a constant source of weakness if colorlessly translated. Take, for example, the five forms of "I." There is the sign of a "spear in the hand" = a very emphatic I; five and a mouth = a weak and defensive I, holding off a crowd by speaking; to conceal = a selfish and private I; self (the cocoon sign) and a mouth = an egoistic I, one who takes pleasure in his own speaking; the self presented is used only when one is speaking to one's self.
I trust that this digression concerning parts of speech may have justified itself. It proves, first, the enormous interest of the Chinese language in throwing light upon our forgotten mental processes, and thus furnishes a new chapter in the philosophy of language. Secondly, it is indispensable for understanding the poetical raw material which the Chinese language affords. Poetry differs from prose in the concrete colors of its diction. It is not enough for it to furnish a meaning to philosophers. It must appeal to emotions with the charm of direct impression, flashing through regions where the intellect can only grope.[6] Poetry must render what is said, not what is merely meant. Abstract meaning gives little vividness, and fullness of imagination gives all. Chinese poetry demands that we abandon our narrow grammatical categories, that we follow the original text with a wealth of concrete verbs.
But this is only the beginning of the matter. So far we have exhibited the Chinese characters and the Chinese sentence chiefly as vivid shorthand pictures of actions and processes in nature. These embody true poetry as far as they go. Such actions are _seen_, but Chinese would be a poor language and Chinese poetry but a narrow art, could they not go on to represent also what is unseen. The best poetry deals not only with natural images but with lofty thoughts, spiritual suggestions and obscure relations. The greater part of natural truth is hidden in processes too minute for vision and in harmonies too large, in vibrations, cohesions and in affinities. The Chinese compass these also, and with great power and beauty.
You will ask, how could the Chinese have built up a great intellectual fabric from mere picture writing? To the ordinary western mind, which believes that thought is concerned with logical categories and which rather condemns the faculty of direct imagination, this feat seems quite impossible. Yet the Chinese language with its peculiar materials has passed over from the seen to the unseen by exactly the same process which all ancient races employed. This process is metaphor, the use of material images to suggest immaterial relations.[7]
The whole delicate substance of speech is built upon substrata of metaphor. Abstract terms, pressed by etymology, reveal their ancient roots still embedded in direct action. But the primitive metaphors do not spring from arbitrary subjective processes. They are possible only because they follow objective lines of relations in nature herself. Relations are more real and more important than the things which they relate. The forces which produce the branch-angles of an oak lay potent in the acorn. Similar lines of resistance, half curbing the out-pressing vitalities, govern the branching of rivers and of nations. Thus a nerve, a wire, a roadway, and a clearing-house are only varying channels which communication forces for itself. This is more than analogy, it is identity of structure. Nature furnishes her own clues. Had the world not been full of homologies, sympathies, and identities, thought would have been starved and language chained to the obvious. There would have been no bridge whereby to cross from the minor truth of the seen to the major truth of the unseen. Not more than a few hundred roots out of our large vocabularies could have dealt directly with physical processes. These we can fairly well identify in primitive Sanskrit. They are, almost without exception, vivid verbs. The wealth of European speech grew, following slowly the intricate maze of nature's suggestions and affinities. Metaphor was piled upon metaphor in quasi-geological strata.
Metaphor, the revealer of nature, is the very substance of poetry. The known interprets the obscure, the universe is alive with myth. The beauty and freedom of the observed world furnish a model, and life is pregnant with art. It is a mistake to suppose, with some philosophers of æsthetics, that art and poetry aim to deal with the general and the abstract. This misconception has been foisted upon us by mediæval logic. Art and poetry deal with the concrete of nature, not with rows of separate "particulars," for such rows do not exist. Poetry is finer than prose because it gives us more concrete truth in the same compass of words. Metaphor, its chief device, is at once the substance of nature and of language. Poetry only does consciously[8] what the primitive races did unconsciously. The chief work of literary men in dealing with language, and of poets especially, lies in feeling back along the ancient lines of advance.[9] He must do this so that he may keep his words enriched by all their subtle undertones of meaning. The original metaphors stand as a kind of luminous background, giving color and vitality, forcing them closer to the concreteness of natural processes. Shakespeare everywhere teems with examples. For these reasons poetry was the earliest of the world arts; poetry, language and the care of myth grew up together.
I have alleged all this because it enables me to show clearly why I believe that the Chinese written language has not only absorbed the poetic substance of nature and built with it a second world of metaphor, but has, through its very pictorial visibility, been able to retain its original creative poetry with far more vigor and vividness than any phonetic tongue. Let us first see how near it is to the heart of nature in its metaphors. We can watch it passing from the seen to the unseen, as we saw it passing from verb to pronoun. It retains the primitive sap, it is not cut and dried like a walking-stick. We have been told that these people are cold, practical, mechanical, literal, and without a trace of imaginative genius. That is nonsense.
Our ancestors built the accumulations of metaphor into structures of language and into systems of thought. Languages to-day are thin and cold because we think less and less into them. We are forced, for the sake of quickness and sharpness, to file down each word to its narrowest edge of meaning. Nature would seem to have become less like a paradise and more and more like a factory. We are content to accept the vulgar misuse of the moment. A late stage of decay is arrested and embalmed in the dictionary. Only scholars and poets feel painfully back along the thread of our etymologies and piece together our diction, as best they may, from forgotten fragments. This anemia of modern speech is only too well encouraged by the feeble cohesive force of our phonetic symbols. There is little or nothing in a phonetic word to exhibit the embryonic stages of its growth. It does not bear its metaphor on its face. We forget that personality once meant, not the soul, but the soul's mask. This is the sort of thing one can not possibly forget in using the Chinese symbols.
In this Chinese shows its advantage. Its etymology is constantly visible. It retains the creative impulse and process, visible and at work. After thousands of years the lines of metaphoric advance are still shown, and in many cases actually retained in the meaning. Thus a word, instead of growing gradually poorer and poorer as with us, becomes richer and still more rich from age to age, almost consciously luminous. Its uses in national philosophy and history, in biography and in poetry, throw about it a nimbus of meanings. These centre about the graphic symbol. The memory can hold them and use them. The very soil of Chinese life seems entangled in the roots of its speech. The manifold illustrations which crowd its annals of personal experience, the lines of tendency which converge upon a tragic climax, moral character as the very core of the principle--all these are flashed at once on the mind as reinforcing values with an accumulation of meaning which a phonetic language can hardly hope to attain. Their ideographs are like blood-stained battle flags to an old campaigner. With us, the poet is the only one for whom the accumulated treasures of the race-words are real and active. Poetic language is always vibrant with fold on fold of overtones, and with natural affinities, but in Chinese the visibility of the metaphor tends to raise this quality to its intensest power.
I have mentioned the tyranny of mediæval logic. According to this European logic thought is a kind of brick-yard. It is baked into little hard units or concepts. These are piled in rows according to size and then labeled with words for future use. This use consists in picking out a few bricks, each by its convenient label, and sticking them together into a sort of wall called a sentence by the use either of white mortar for the positive copula "is," or of black mortar for the negative copula "is not." In this way we produce such admirable propositions as "A ring-tailed baboon is not a constitutional assembly."
Let us consider a row of cherry trees. From each of these in turn we proceed to take an "abstract," as the phrase is, a certain common lump of qualities which we may express together by the name cherry or cherry-ness. Next we place in a second table several such characteristic concepts: cherry, rose, sunset, iron-rust, flamingo. From these we abstract some further common quality, dilutation or mediocrity, and label it "red" or "redness." It is evident that this process of abstraction may be carried on indefinitely and with all sorts of material. We may go on forever building pyramids of attenuated concept until we reach the apex "being."
But we have done enough to illustrate the characteristic process. At the base of the pyramid lie _things_, but stunned, as it were. They can never know themselves for things until they pass up and down among the layers of the pyramids. The way of passing up and down the pyramid may be exemplified as follows: We take a concept of lower attenuation, such as "cherry"; we see that it is contained under one higher, such as "redness." Then we are permitted to say in sentence form, "Cherryness is contained under redness," or for short, "(the) cherry is red." If, on the other hand, we do not find our chosen subject under a given predicate we use the black copula and say, for example, "(The) cherry is not liquid."
From this point we might go on to the theory of the syllogism, but we refrain. It is enough to note that the practised logician finds it convenient to store his mind with long lists of nouns and adjectives, for these are naturally the names of classes. Most text-books on language begin with such lists. The study of verbs is meagre, for in such a system there is only one real working verb, to-wit, the quasi-verb "is." All other verbs can be transformed into participles and gerunds. For example, "to run" practically becomes a case of "running." Instead of thinking directly, "The man runs," our logician makes two subjective equations, namely: The individual in question is contained under the class "man"; and the class "man" is contained under the class of "running things."
The sheer loss and weakness of this method is apparent and flagrant. Even in its own sphere it can not think half of what it wants to think. It has no way of bringing together any two concepts which do not happen to stand one under the other and in the same pyramid. It is impossible to represent change in this system or any kind of growth. This is probably why the conception of evolution came so late in Europe. _It could not make way until it was prepared to destroy the inveterate logic of classification._
Far worse than this, such logic can not deal with any kind of interaction or with any multiplicity of function. According to it, the function of my muscles is as isolated from the function of my nerves, as from an earthquake in the moon. For it the poor neglected things at the bases of the pyramids are only so many particulars or pawns.
Science fought till she got at the things. All her work has been done from the base of the pyramids, not from the apex. She has discovered how functions cohere in things. She expresses her results in grouped sentences which embody no nouns or adjectives but verbs of special character. The true formula for thought is: The cherry tree is all that it does. Its correlated verbs compose it. At bottom these verbs are transitive. Such verbs may be almost infinite in number.
In diction and in grammatical form science is utterly opposed to logic. Primitive men who created language agreed with science and not with logic. Logic has abused the language which they left to her mercy. Poetry agrees with science and not with logic.
The moment we use the copula, the moment we express subjective inclusions, poetry evaporates. The more concretely and vividly we express the interactions of things the better the poetry. We need in poetry thousands of active words, each doing its utmost to show forth the motive and vital forces. We can not exhibit the wealth of nature by mere summation, by the piling of sentences. Poetic thought works by suggestion, crowding maximum meaning into the single phrase pregnant, charged, and luminous from within.
In Chinese character each work accumulated this sort of energy in itself.
Should we pass formally to the study of Chinese poetry, we should warn ourselves against logicianized pitfalls. We should beware of modern narrow utilitarian meanings ascribed to the words in commercial dictionaries. We should try to preserve the metaphoric overtones. We should beware of English grammar, its hard parts of speech, and its lazy satisfaction with nouns and adjectives. We should seek and at least bear in mind the verbal undertone of each noun. We should avoid "is" and bring in a wealth of neglected English verbs. Most of the existing translations violate all of these rules.[10]
The development of the normal transitive sentence rests upon the fact that one action in nature promotes another; thus the agent and the object are secretly verbs. For example, our sentence, "Reading promotes writing," would be expressed in Chinese by three full verbs. Such a form is the equivalent of three expanded clauses and can be drawn out into adjectival, participial, infinitive, relative or conditional members. One of many possible examples is, "If one reads it teaches him how to write." Another is, "One who reads becomes one who writes." But in the first condensed form a Chinese would write, "Read promote write." The dominance of the verb and its power to obliterate all other parts of speech give us the model of terse fine style.
I have seldom seen our rhetoricians dwell on the fact that the great strength of our language lies in its splendid array of transitive verbs, drawn both from Anglo-Saxon and from Latin sources. These give us the most individual characterizations of force. Their power lies in their recognition of nature as a vast storehouse of forces. We do not say in English that things seem, or appear, or eventuate, or even that they are; but that they _do_. Will is the foundation of our speech.[11] We catch the Demiurge in the act. I had to discover for myself why Shakespeare's English was so immeasurably superior to all others. I found that it was his persistent, natural, and magnificent use of hundreds of transitive verbs. Rarely will you find an "is" in his sentences. "Is" weakly lends itself to the uses of our rhythm, in the unaccented syllables; yet he sternly discards it. A study of Shakespeare's verbs should underlie all exercises in style.
We find in poetical Chinese a wealth of transitive verbs, in some way greater even than in the English of Shakespeare. This springs from their power of combining several pictorial elements in a single character. We have in English no verb for what two things, say the sun and moon, both do together. Prefixes and affixes merely direct and qualify. In Chinese the verb can be more minutely qualified. We find a hundred variants clustering about a single idea. Thus "to sail a boat for purposes of pleasure" would be an entirely different verb from "to sail for purposes of commerce." Dozens of Chinese verbs express various shades of grieving, yet in English translations they are usually reduced to one mediocrity. Many of them can be expressed only by periphrasis, but what right has the translator to neglect the overtones? There are subtle shadings. We should strain our resources in English.
It is true that the pictorial clue of many Chinese ideographs can not now be traced, and even Chinese lexicographers admit that combinations frequently contribute only a phonetic value. But I find it incredible that any such minute subdivision of the idea could have ever existed alone as abstract sound without the concrete character. It contradicts the law of evolution. Complex ideas arise only gradually, as the power of holding them together arises. The paucity of Chinese sound could not so hold them. Neither is it conceivable that the whole list was made at once, as commercial codes of cipher are compiled. Therefore we must believe that the phonetic theory is in large part unsound. The metaphor once existed in many cases where we can not now trace it. Many of our own etymologies have been lost. It is futile to take the ignorance of the Han dynasty for omniscience.[12] It is not true, as Legge said, that the original picture characters could never have gone far in building up abstract thought. This is a vital mistake. We have seen that our own languages have all sprung from a few hundred vivid phonetic verbs by figurative derivation. A fabric more vast could have been built up in Chinese by metaphorical composition. No attenuated idea exists which it might not have reached more vividly and more permanently than we could have been expected to reach with phonetic roots. Such a pictorial method, whether the Chinese exemplified it or not, would be the ideal language of the world.
Still, is it not enough to show that Chinese poetry gets back near to the processes of nature by means of its vivid figure, its wealth of such figure? If we attempt to follow it in English we must use words highly charged, words whose vital suggestion shall interplay as nature interplays. Sentences must be like the mingling of the fringes of feathered banners, or as the colors of many flowers blended into the single sheen of a meadow.
The poet can never see too much or feel too much. His metaphors are only ways of getting rid of the dead white plaster of the copula. He resolves its indifference into a thousand tints of verb. His figures flood things with jets of various light, like the sudden upblaze of fountains. The prehistoric poets who created language discovered the whole harmonious framework of nature, they sang out her processes in their hymns. And this diffused poetry which they created, Shakespeare has condensed into a more tangible substance. Thus in all poetry a word is like a sun, with its corona and chromosphere; words crowd upon words, and enwrap each other in their luminous envelopes until sentences become clear, continuous light-bands.
Now we are in condition to appreciate the full splendor of certain lines of Chinese verse. Poetry surpasses prose especially in that the poet selects for juxtaposition those words whose overtones blend into a delicate and lucid harmony. All arts follow the same law; refined harmony lies in the delicate balance of overtones. In music the whole possibility and theory of harmony is based on the overtones. In this sense poetry seems a more difficult art.
How shall we determine the metaphorical overtones of neighboring words? We can avoid flagrant breaches like mixed metaphor. We can find the concord or harmonizing at its intensest, as in Romeo's speech over the dead Juliet.
Here also the Chinese ideography has its advantage, in even a simple line, for example, "The sun rises in the east."
The overtones vibrate against the eye. The wealth of composition in characters makes possible a choice of words in which a single dominant overtone colors every plane of meaning. That is perhaps the most conspicuous quality of Chinese poetry. Let us examine our line.
[Illustration: Chinese ideograms. Sun Rises (in the) East]
The sun, the shining, on one side, on the other the sign of the east, which is the sun entangled in the branches of a tree. And in the middle sign, the verb "rise," we have further homology; the sun is above the horizon, but beyond that the single upright line is like the growing trunk-line of the tree sign. This is but a beginning, but it points a way to the method, and to the method of intelligent reading.
[1] The apology was unnecessary, but Professor Fenollosa saw fit to make it, and I therefore transcribe his words.--E.P.
[2] Style, that is to say, limpidity, as opposed to rhetoric.--E.P.
[3] Even Latin, living Latin had not the network of rules they foist upon unfortunate school-children. These are borrowed sometimes from Greek grammarians, even as I have seen English grammars borrowing oblique cases from Latin grammars. Sometimes they sprang from the grammatizing or categorizing passion of pedants. Living Latin had only the feel of the cases: the ablative and dative emotion.--E.P.
[4] A good writer would use "shine" (i.e., to shine), shining, and "the shine" or "sheen", possibly thinking of the German "_schöne_" and "_Schönheit_"; but this does not invalidate Prof. Fenollosa's next contention.--E.P.
[5] This is a bad example. We can say "I look a fool", "look", transitive, now means resemble. The main contention is however correct. We tend to abandon specific words like _resemble_ and substitute, for them, vague verbs with prepositional directors, or riders.--E.P.
[6] _Cf_. principle of Primary apparition, "Spirit of Romance".--E.P.
[7] Compare Aristotle's _Poetics_.--E.P.
[8] Vide also an article on "Vorticism" in the _Fortnightly Review_ for September, 1914. "The language of exploration" now in my "Gaudier-Brzeska."--E.P.
[9] I would submit in all humility that this applies in the rendering of ancient texts. The poet in dealing with his own time, must also see to it that language does not petrify on his hands. He must prepare for new advances along the lines of true metaphor that is interpretative metaphor, or image, as diametrically opposed to untrue, or ornamental metaphor.--E.P.
[10] These precautions should be broadly conceived. It is not so much their letter, as the underlying feeling of objectification and activity, that matters.--E.P.
[11] Compare Dante's definition of "rectitudo" as the direction of the will, probably taken from Aquinas.--E.P.
[12] Professor Fenollosa is well borne out by chance evidence. The vorticist sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska sat in my room before he went off to the war. He was able to read the Chinese radicals and many compound signs almost at pleasure. He was of course, used to consider all life and nature in the terms of planes and of bounding lines. Nevertheless he had spent only a fortnight in the museum studying the Chinese characters. He was amazed at the stupidity of lexicographers who could not discern for all their learning the pictorial values which were to him perfectly obvious and apparent. Curiously enough, a few weeks later Edmond Dulac, who is of a totally different tradition, sat here, giving an impromptu panegyric on the elements of Chinese art, on the units of composition, drawn from the written characters. He did not use Professor Fenollosa's own words, he said "bamboo" instead of "rice". He said the essence of the bamboo is in a certain way it grows, they have this in their sign for bamboo, all designs of bamboo proceed from it. Then he went on rather to disparage vorticism, on the grounds that it could not hope to do for the Occident, in one life-time, what had required centuries of development in China.--E.P.
End of Project Gutenberg's Instigations, by Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa