Part 2

Student: You speak of a time when scholarship was new, when humanism had not given way to philology. We have no one like Henry Stephen, no one comparable to Helia Andrea. The role of your monastery is now assumed by the “institutions of learning,” the spirit of your class-room is found among a few scattered enthusiasts, men half ignorant in the present “scholarly” sense, but alive with the spirit of learning, avid of truth, avid of beauty, avid of strange and out of the way bits of knowledge. Do you like this scrap of Pratinas?

Rabelais (reads)

’Εμὸς ἐμὸς ὁ Βρομίος Εμὲ δεῖ κελαδεῖν Εμὶ δεῖ παταγεῖν ’Αν ὀρεα εσσάμενον Μετὰ Ναἲδων Οἷα τε κύκνον ἄγοντα Ποικιλόπτερον μέλος Τᾶv ἀοιδᾶν....

Student: The movement is interesting. I am “educated,” I am considerably more than a “graduate.” I confess that I can not translate it.

Rabelais: What in God’s name have they taught you?!!

Student: I hope they have taught me nothing. I managed to read many books despite their attempts at suppression, or rather perversion.

Rabelais: I think you speak in a passion; that you magnify petty annoyances. Since then, you have been in the world for some years, you have been able to move at your freedom.

Student: I speak in no passion when I say that the whole aim, or at least the drive, of modern philology is to make a man stupid; to turn his mind from the fire of genius and smother him with things unessential. Germany has so stultified her savants that they have had no present perception, the men who should have perceived were all imbedded in “scholarship.” And as for freedom, no man is free who has not the modicum of an income. If I had but fifty francs weekly....

Rabelais: Weekly? C..... J....!

Student: You forget that the value of money has very considerably altered.

Rabelais: Admitted.

Student: Well?

Rabelais: Well, who has constrained you? The press in your day is free.

Student: C..... J....!

Rabelais: But the press in your day is free.

Student: There is not a book goes to the press in my country, or in England, but a society of ....... in one, or in the other a pie-headed ignorant printer paws over it to decide how much is indecent.

Rabelais: But they print my works in translation.

Student: Your work is a classic. They also print Trimalcio’s _Supper_, and the tales of Suetonius, and red-headed virgins annotate the writings of Martial, but let a novelist mention a privy, or a poet the rear side of a woman, and the whole town reeks with an uproar. In England a scientific work was recently censored. A great discovery was kept secret three years. For the rest, I do not speak of obscenity. Obscene books are sold in the rubber shops, they are doled out with quack medicines, societies for the Suppression of Vice go into all details, and thereby attain circulation. Masterpieces are decked out with lewd covers to entoil one part of the public, but let an unknown man write clear and clean realism; let a poet use the speech of his predecessors, either being as antiseptic as the instruments of a surgeon, and out of the most debased and ignorant classes they choose him his sieve and his censor.

Rabelais: But surely these things are avoidable?

Student: The popular novelist, the teaser and tickler, casts what they call a veil, or caul, over his language. He pimps with suggestion. The printer sees only one word at a time, and tons of such books are passed yearly, the members of the Royal Automobile Club and of the Isthmian and Fly Fishers are not concerned with the question of morals.

Rabelais: You mistake me, I did not mean this sort of evasion, I did not mean that a man should ruin his writing or join the ranks of procurers.

Student: Well?

Rabelais: Other means. There is what is called private printing.

Student: I have had a printer refuse to print lines “in any form” private or public, perfectly innocent lines, lines refused thus in London, which appeared and caused no blush in Chicago; and vice-versa, lines refused in Chicago and printed by a fat-headed prude—Oh, most fat-headed—in London, a man who will have no ruffling of anyone’s skirts, and who will not let you say that some children do not enjoy the proximity of their parents.

Rabelais: At least you are free from theology.

Student: If you pinch the old whore by the toes you will find a press clique against you; you will come up against “boycott”; people will rush into your publisher’s office with threats. Have you ever heard of “the libraries?”

Rabelais: I have heard the name, but not associated with strange forms of blackmail.

Student: I admit they do not affect serious writers.

Rabelais: But you think your age as stupid as mine.

Student: Humanity is a herd, eaten by perpetual follies. A few in each age escape, the rest remain savages, “That deyed the Arbia crimson.” Were the shores of Gallipoli paler, that showed red to the airmen flying thousands of feet above them?

Rabelais: Airmen. Intercommunication is civilization. Your life is full of convenience.

Student: And men as stupid as ever. We have no one like Henry Stephen. Have you ever read Galdos’ _Dona Perfecta_? In every country you will find such nests of provincials. Change but a few names and customs. Each Klein-Stadt has its local gods and will kill those who offend them. In one place it is religion, in another some crank theory of hygiene or morals, or even of prudery which takes no moral concern.

Rabelais: Yet all peoples act the same way. The same so-called “vices” are everywhere present, unless your nation has invented some new ones.

Student: Greed and hypocrisy, there is little novelty to be got out of either. At present there is a new tone, a new _timbre_ of lying, a sort of habit, almost a faculty for refraining from connecting words with a fact. An inconception of their interrelations.

Rabelais: Let us keep out of politics.

Student: Damn it, have you ever met presbyterians?

Rabelais: You forget that I lived in the time of John Calvin.

Student: Let us leave this and talk of your books.

Rabelais: My book has the fault of most books, there are too many words in it. I was tainted with monkish habits, with the marasmus of allegory, of putting one thing for another: the clumsiest method of satire. I doubt if any modern will read me.

Student: I knew a man read you for joy of the words, for the opulence of your vocabulary.

Rabelais: Which would do him no good unless he could keep all the words on his tongue. Tell me, can you read them, they are often merely piled up in heaps.

Student: I confess that I can not. I take a page and then stop.

Rabelais: Allegory, all damnable allegory! And can you read Brantôme?

Student: I can read a fair chunk of Brantôme. The repetition is wearing.

Rabelais: And you think your age is as stupid as mine? Even letters are better, a critical sense is developed.

Student: We lack the old vigour.

Rabelais: A phrase you have got from professors! Vigour was not lacking in Stendhal, I doubt if it is lacking in your day. And as for the world being as stupid, are your friends tied to the stake, as was Etienne Dolet, with an “Ave” wrung out of him to get him strangled instead of roasted. Do you have to stand making professions like Budé?!!

Vivens vidensque gloria mea frui Volo: nihil juvat mortuum Quod vel diserte scripserit vel fecerit Animose.

Student: What is that?

Rabelais: Some verses of Dolet’s. And are you starved like Desperiers, Bonaventura, and driven to suicide?

Student: The last auto-da-fe was in 1759. The inquisition reestablished in 1824.

Rabelais: Spain again! I was speaking of....

Student: We are not yet out of the wood. There is no end to this warfare. You talk of freedom. Have you heard of the Hammersmith borough council, or the society to suppress all brothels in “Rangoon and other stations in Burmah?” If it is not creed it is morals. Your life and works would not be possible nowadays. To put it mildly, you would be docked your professorship.

Rabelais: I should find other forms of freedom. As for personal morals: There are certain so-called “sins” of which no man ever repented. There are certain contraventions of hygiene which always prove inconvenient. None but superstitious and ignorant people can ever confuse these two issues. And as hygiene is always changing; as it alters with our knowledge of physick, intelligent men will keep pace with it. There can be no permanent boundaries to morals.

Student: The droits du seigneur were doubtless, at one time, religious. When ecclesiastics enjoyed them, they did so, in order to take the vengeance of the spirit-world upon their own shoulders, thereby shielding and sparing the husband.

Rabelais: Indeed you are far past these things. Your age no longer accepts them.

Student: My age is beset with cranks of all forms and sizes. They will not allow a man wine. They will not allow him changes of women. This glass....

Rabelais: There is still some in the last bottle. DeThou has paid it a compliment:

Aussi Bacchus....

Jusqu’en l’autre monde m’envoye De quoi dissiper mon chagrin, Car de ma Maison paternelle Il vient de faire un Cabaret Où le plaisir se renouvelle Entre le blanc et le clairet... On n’y porte plus sa pensée Qu’aux douceurs d’un Vin frais et net. Que si Pluton, que rien ne tente, Vouloit se payer de raison, Et permettre à mon Ombre errante De faire un tour à ma Maison; Quelque prix que j’en puisse attendre, Ce seroit mon premier souhait De la louer ou de la vendre, Pour l’usage que l’on en fait.

Student: There are states where a man’s tobacco is not safe from invasion. Bishops, novelists, decrepit and aged generals, purveyors of tales of detectives....

Rabelais: Have they ever interfered with your pleasures?

Student: Damn well let them try it!!!

Rabelais: I am afraid you would have been burned in my century.

END OF THE FIRST DIALOGUE

Imaginary Letters

(Six Letters of William Bland Burn to his Wife)

Wyndham Lewis

Petrograd, February, 1917.

My dear Lydia:

Once more to the charge= In your answer to my letter I feel the new touch of an independent attack. Villerant comes in, but I feel this time that you have set your own dear person up for a rebuff. You have not sent me any Aunt Sally, but my Grecian wife. I will take two things and answer them.=First, you object to my treatment of the Gentleman, because you sharply maintain, more or less, that I by no means object to being a gentleman myself.=On that point, my dear girl, you have _not got_ me. For many purposes, on occasion I should not hesitate to emphasize the fact that I was not born in the gutter. If, for instance, I was applying for a post where such a qualification was necessary, Harrow would not be forgotten. The Gutter generally spoils a man’s complexion in childhood. He grows up with sores around his mouth and a constantly dirty skin. His eyes, unless he has them well in hand, become wolfish and hard, etc. Who would not be better pleased that he was born on the sunny side of the wall? All that has nothing to do with my argument. Those things are in themselves nothing to linger round, although the opposite, squalor and meanness, it is more excusable to remember and lament.

But in your last letter you reveal an idea that seems chiefly to have struck you, and which is at the bottom of your present obstinacy. In your letter of last month you kept it in the background, or did not state it in so many words.

(In once more reading through your present letter, I find you have not even stated it _there_. But I see, I believe, the notion that has found favour with you.) I will give you my opinion on it in the form of a criticism of an article I read yesterday in an English paper (one of those you sent me).

A Russian war-novel is discussed. The writer of the article “does not care much for Russian books,” he finds that “the Englishman begins where the Russian leaves off.” The Russian book seems to deal with the inner conflict of a Russian grocer on the outbreak of War. The Russian grocer is confused and annoyed. He asks what all this bloody trouble has to do with _him_—the small grocer. He cogitates on the causes of such upheavals, and is not convinced that there is anything in them calling for his participation. But eventually he realizes that there is a great and moving abstraction called Russia=the _old_ abstraction in fact, the old Pied Piper whistling his mournful airs, and waving towards a snow-bound horizon. And—_le voilà_ in khaki=or the Russian equivalent. At this point he becomes “noble,” and of interest to the writer of the article—But there, alas, the book ends.= Now, (of course the writer of the article continues) _we_ in England do not do things in that way. We do not portray the boring and hardly respectable conflict. No Englishman (all Englishmen having the instincts of gentlemen) admits the possibility of such a conflict. _We_ are _accomplished_ beings, _des hommes, ou plutôt des gentlemen faits_! We should begin with the English grocer already in khaki, quite calm, (he would probably be described as a little “grim” withal) in the midst of his military training on Salisbury Plain. A Kiplingesque picture of that: Revetting would come in, and bomb-throwing at night. He next would be in the trenches. The writer would show, without the cunning, hardly respectable, disguise of any art, how the Balham grocer of to-day was the same soldier, really, that won at Waterloo= You would not get a person or a fact, but a piece of patriotic propaganda (the writer of course being meanwhile a shrewd fellow, highly approved and well-paid).

Now glance at Tolstoi for a moment, that arch Russian bore, and at his book of Sebastopol sketches. He was an hereditary noble, and it is rather difficult to say that an hereditary noble is not a gentleman. But can the English journalist in his “_fort interieur_” admit that Tolstoi was a gentleman, all things considered? These foreign “nobles” are a funny sort of gentlemen, anyway. For let us see how Tolstoi writes of the Russians at Sebastopol.= He arrives at the town of Sebastopol. He has read in the Moscow newspapers of the “heroic defenders of Sebastopol.” His first impression is one of astonishment and disappointment of a sort. For there is nothing noticeably heroic about the demeanour of the soldiers working at the quays or walking in the streets. They are not even heroic by reason of the ineffable “cheeriness” of the British Tommy—(No journalist would be tolerated for a moment who did not, once in every twenty lines, remark on this ineffable national heroism of humour.)=Tolstoi, that is, does not _want_ to see heroes, but men under given conditions and, that is, sure enough, what he sees. He also, being an hereditary noble and so on, does not want to make his living. One more opportunity of truth and clearness! Next, when Tolstoi gets up to the bastions, he again sees no heroes with any ineffable national cachet. The “heroes” of his sketches and tales, in fact, stoop and scurry along behind parapets in lonely sectors, and when they see another man coming straighten themselves out, and clank their spurs. They kill people in nightmares, and pray pessimistically to their God. You cannot at the end apply _any_ labels to them. Tolstoi’s account of their sensations and genuine exploits would not strike terror in the heart of future enemies of the Russian race; it is not an advertisement, or the ordinary mawkish bluff thrown over a reality. He had the sense to see human beings and not Russians. And _Russians_ are chiefly redoubtable, and admirable, because of this capacity of impersonal seeing and feeling. Where they are least Russian in fact.

The discriminating enemy in reading these sketches, would fear that more than he would any unreal or interested gush.

There always remains the question as to whether, by gush and bluff and painting a pretty picture of a man, you cannot make him _become_ that picture=and whether, politically, it may not be desirable to manufacture illusions of that description. But what have we got to do with politicians?

Again, I am not saying that Russians have not a national gush. Tolstoi himself indulges in it. Everybody indulges in such things. It is a question only of the scale of such indulgence; of the absence per head in a population of the reverse.

So then, what the paper-writer’s point amounted to was that only _gentlemen_ (or, sententiously, _men_) were worth writing about=or only at the moment when a man becomes a “gentleman” is he interesting, worth noticing, or suitable for portrayal. We all, however, know the simple rules and manifestations of this ideal figure. There is not much left to say on the subject. Ah yes, but there is such and such a one’s ineffable _way_ of being a gentleman!—

In London you will meet few educated people who really are willing or able to give Russian books their due. Dostoevsky is a sort of epileptic bore, Tolstoi a wrong-headed old altruistic bore, Gorky a Tramp-stunt bore, Turgenev, even, although in another category, in some way disappointing.—All Russian writers insist on discovering America, opening discussions on matters that our institutions, our position in society, our Franco-English intelligence preclude any consideration of. There is something permanently transcendental and disconcerting about the Slav infant, and he pours his words out and argues interminably, and is such an inveterate drunkard,—as though his natural powers of indecorum and earnestness were not already enough.

What really could be said of the Russian is this=Shakespeare is evidently better than any Russian novelist, or more permanently valuable. But the little Russian Grocer could rival Hamlet in vacillation; or any Russian, Shakespeare, in his portrayal of the _machinery_ of the mind. Dostoevsky is not more dark and furious than Shakespeare’s pessimistic figures, Lear, Macbeth, etc. _But we are not Englishmen of Shakespeare’s days._

We are very pleased that in the time of Elizabeth such a national ornament existed. But Shakespeare would be an anachronism to-day.

Dostoevsky and Co. were anachronisms as contemporaries of Tennyson and Napoleon III. _Had they been embedded two centuries back in Sixteenth Century Russia_, they would not be read, but would not cause annoyance and be called epileptic bores. Epilepsy would have been all right in those distances.—There is nothing dévoué about epilepsy to-day, any more than there is about a King!

I think I have been lucid, if rather long-winded=

How I look on these Christian Demi-Gods of the Steppes you know. I like them immensely. For a single brandyish whiff from one of Dostovesky’s mouths, at some vivid angle of turpitude I would give all English literature back to Shelley’s songs. Turgenev’s _Sportsman’s Sketches_ enchant me. They are so sober, delicate and nonchalant; I can think of nothing like them. Gogol’s Tchichikoff is back with Cervantes, Sterne and the others who have not any peers in these days.

_Today_=the requirements of the little man, especially of this day, are a similar thing to the _Russian_, the _Englishman_, etc. We must disembarrass ourselves of this fetish or gush, as of that other.—I want to live with Shakespeare and Cervantes=and I have gone to war for good with all things that would oppose a return to those realities.

I feel you, in my absence, becoming enmeshed in environing respectability and its amiable notions. I feel that this letter may require another fervour to drive home, or excuse, its own=_A coup de poing_ is the best method of enforcing an idea (or a shell)=the mouth is similarly a more satisfactory aperture than the ear for introducing a philosophy into another body. Yorke is the embodiment of my philosophy. I love Yorke in exactly the way that I love a character in Molière or Turgenev. Yorke is the only _living thing except yourself_, that I know or find alive to the same extent.

I shall stick here a little longer, and see what comes of my new venture. There have been lots of delays and difficulties which I will recite to you when we meet. I can, I am afraid, say absolutely nothing definite about my return. But I will write to you in a few days and tell you more certainly. Meantime, much love, my dear girl. I wish you were here with me. But on seeing how active the Germans are, it is out of the question your crossing the North Sea.

I am looking forward to your next letter. Much love.

Yours, W. B. Burn.

(_Next letter of series will appear in July number._)

The Reader Critic

From James Joyce

James Joyce, Zurich, Switzerland:

I am very glad to hear about the new plans for _The Little Review_ and that you have got together so many good writers as contributors. I hope to send you something very soon—as soon, in fact, as my health allows me to resume work. I am much better however, though I am still under care of the doctor. I wish _The Little Review_ every success.

Approval

Alice Groff, Philadelphia:

Never has _The Little Review_ pleased me, from cover to cover, as in the May number. I cannot imagine finding any one to express me for myself, but Mr. Ezra Pound in his editorial comes the nearest possible to doing this, as far as he goes.

What he says about the Christian religion is delicious in its gentle tolerance; about organized religions, is the last word; about “the formation of thought in clear speech for the use of humanity,” a religion in itself. He utters my whole voice on “codes of propriety” in asserting that “they have no place in the arts.” I would add “nor in life, other than as subject matter.”

His rallying cry to _The Egoist_ stirs my egoist soul to its depth. Ever since I have known this journal I have felt it to be the finest, freest, frankest, bravest avenue of expression in English ever opened to the creative literary mind, in all its variety of faculty, without having the least bias or prejudice as to any one variety. That _The Little Review_ should respond to this rallying cry would add a still deeper and stronger point to my already deep and strong interest in this brave little (?) magazine.

Fear Not

Mrs. O. D. J.:

I have great faith in the artistic life of America and I don’t think Ezra Pound’s notions of it are very healthy. I sincerely hope the trend of it will not emulate the “smart” or dissipated literature which seems to please London and which can hardly come under the head of “good letters.” America must not necessarily be content with jejune flows of words. Really the only half interesting articles that appeared in the May number were Eliot’s and Pound’s—the former because it was about as good as _The Smart Set_ and the latter on account of auld lang syne. My harshness is really flattering because it shows that I expect better things from the “cultured” English.