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<ab>Published Monthly
The Egoist
No. 2.—Vol. VI. MARCH—APRIL 1919. Ninepence.
Editor: HARRIET SHAW WEAVER
Assistant Editor: T. S. ELIOT
Contributing Editor: DORA MARSDEN
CONTENTS
PAGE
Philosophy: The Science of Signs XVII. Truth (continued). By D. Marsden ..... 17
Poems. By Richard Aldington..... 23
Performances of Old Music ..... 23
The French Idea. By Madame Ciolkowska . . 24
Hellenist Series. VI. By Ezra Pound ... 24
PAGE
Ulysses. Episode III. By James Joyce ... 26
Three Georgian Novelists. III. By Douglas Goldring 30
Towards a Peace Theatre. III. By Huntly Carter . 30
The Italian Idea ....... 31
"The Anglo-French Review" . . . .32
"Quia Pauper Amavi"......32
The Adelphi Gallery......32 </ab></div>
<div type="articles">
<ab>PHILOSOPHY: THE SCIENCE OF SIGNS XVII. TRUTH (continued) III. The Meaning of Error
By D. Marsden
I
(1) WITH the classical problem of error which has been debated from Socrates and earlier down to the immediate present, we shall concern ourselves here little beyond giving the barest indication of its character and of what, in our opinion, is its solution.
The outstanding fact relative to it is, of course, that it has never advanced beyond difficulties which are purely logical. We consider that the reason for this is plain. The philosophers who have applied themselves to the problem of truth and to a problem of error so peculiarly handled as to constitute a problem of error in itself distinct from that of truth, have never applied that measure of stringent discipline to their own logical definitions which could give to these a mutual coherence sufficient to exclude contradictions from the bare enunciation. They have in consequence found their energies used up in disentangling logical knots of their own tying. It is not admissible for us, of course, even to pretend to despise logical difficulties and subtleties. Quite the contrary, since our entire conception of the nature and work of the intellect commits us to the position that logic furnishes the key which alone can open up a way into any branch of knowledge, and that only in the wake of our logical anticipations can we advance even to physical observation and experiment, and hence to any consequent confirmation of these logic-born truths. We hold that we have to apprehend mentally what we are looking for before we see it, and advance towards what we discover in the strength of a prior expectation of its existence. The very instruments we take with us and upon which we rely for the detection of the agencies we seek are conceived and given shape under the impulse of what amounts to anticipatory logical divination, and the only reason we hold it unnecessary to argue the classical problem of error at length is because out of this feature of fundamental logical coherence we have spun the entire stuff and substance of our theory as a whole.
(2) But to state the problem as it has presented itself to philosophy:
The difficulty has been to exorcise certain seemingly unavoidable contradictions which have reappeared in every attempt to express in logical form the nature of things as revealed in our experience, and what we propose to say is that instead of this being due to some melancholy inscrutability in the nature of things, it is just the commonplace outcome of a commonplace mental slovenliness on the part of the philosopher. As an actual specimen of this slovenliness we can take the assumption—which in practice carries the value of a definition—that to have existence and to be real are synonymous expressions. If any experience exists it must be real; and since we all know that error exists, error must be real; and, moreover, since that which possesses reality must be accepted as possessing truth, error itself must be possessed of truth. Hence, error must be a species of truth.
(3) Put into ordinary phraseology in this way, the whole matter sounds childish, and it is childish in the sense that it is patently inconsequent. The only reason which can account for mature intellects committing themselves to the like is that they feel themselves antecedently committed to the logical assertion which carries them in its train. In this instance, the pernicious statement is that being is synonymous with reality, and the only means which provides an escape from the contradictions indicated lies in the contention that, for the present at least, reality is comparatively only a small department of the universe of being. The true synonyms for being we find in such phrases as existence in general; the totality of experience; the totality of all that can be felt. And since every feeling itself forms one with some form of movement in the organic tissues of the organism which feels it (and vice versa), the significa-
##18_ THE EGOIST March—April 1919
tion of the term being is coterminous with the totality of such organic motions, and includes therefore every form of experience created out of the organic movements of every form of life, subhuman as well as human. Feeling is not something which has relevance only in connexion with man, but reality on the contrary has precisely just this limited human reference.
(4) Beauty comes into being (that universe of feeling which includes reality but is not itself coextensive with it), only because the specific human endowment happens to be just what it is: that is to say, dual; in the first place, the power to use signs and hence to create those new conceptual forms of experience which collectively constitute mind; and in the second, the new, vastly extended power of spatial interference constituted by the possession of hands. It is the duality of man's endowment which has created a niche for reality. Were man simply, as the logician would hold, the animal whose differentiation is the possession of a mind, or were he simply what the naturalist claims, the animal possessing two hands, then even for man the notion of a world-aspect which was real as opposed to a world-aspect which was something else, would not and could not have arisen. The whole relevance of the real arises out of the situation created by the fact that the effects of two distinctively human powers work in contrast as well as in conjunction with one another. The power called that of mind creates a new order of mental things which on account of their greater delicacy and fluidity, their greater ease and immunity of assembly, attract one another and combine in a readier manner than their more resistant sensory counterparts, and therefore bring about those identifications of related forces which anticipate corresponding identifications in the world of sense in a manner and fashion already described. Thus, things which have no existence in the world of sense achieve an existence in the world of mind so that the external order of things is made to appear as if it were veined through with an anticipatory scaffolding of possible combinations and identities. The meaning of realization and reality therefore resides in the fact that the hand—and even more, hand-contrived instruments constructed upon the manual model—can so interfere with the organism's existent spatial creations as to produce a sensory copy in space of the new combination which has already declared itself in mind. The hand reproduces in a sense-medium those things which the organism first experiences in an ideal one, and wherever ideal forms admit of this reproduction, the term real becomes applicable; and accepting the argument which we have been developing throughout this series that the mental thing is merely a more intimate, more vitally characterized extension of the organic scheme of movement which constitutes the external, sensory thing, we can then say that an idea becomes real whenever the manual forces can manipulate existing externalized experiences so as to allow the incipient scheme of movement as it exists in mind to project itself across the great refracting ridge constituted by the sense-organs situated on the surface of the mobile organic body. Quite the most fascinating ideas of mind are these which develop in advance of their corresponding appearance in the outer world, and invite the labour of the hands to bring that outer world into line with the inner, even while the mental powers are striking out new veins of experience still further ahead. They enable humanity to see in a growing world of the real both its romance and its destiny. The chemistry of the human brain, backed up by the industry of the human hands, makes man's life a steady progress towards a perfected power to render real all which he can conceive and desire as idea.
(5) There are, however, as we have already pointed out, a vast number of more prosaic things of mind which are begotten in a direction the reverse of this, and come into the higher form of being called consciousness as copies of already existent external things. That is, they are born real. And to these occupants of the mind we have to add also others whose mentally created forms we make no attempt to realize even though they may be exerting an incessantly modifying influence upon the springs of our daily conduct. We are satisfied to let them live in the imaginative world only. And there are again other mental occupants whose form we could not realize even if we would: this, because they are not coherent in themselves, even as ideas. They embody contradictions. They assume the organism's power to enact a particular form of movement alongside a second assumption of its powerlessness in that very respect. They are therefore crabbed ideas: mere confusions of what we can do and what we cannot: monstrosities of the mind misrepresenting the organism's powers not only in the world of externalized action, but in the internal actions of the mind. Therefore, in view of the wide possibilities of discrepancy arising between the ideal form of movement and the supposedly corresponding sensory one, and in view of the fact that we use a common sign to indicate both the ideal movement in isolation and in conjunction with the real, there emerges an obvious need for terms applicable not only to the character of the movements started, but to the sign which starts them. That is, in addition to the terms real and unreal as applied to the released movements, the terms true and erroneous, as applied to the releasing cue, the label, the sign, will be necessary. For reasons which we have already given at length, the sign, in order to fulfil its function of liberating cue, must be possessed of this dual relationship. It must label the exclusively ideal, and at the same time stand for the fuller real form corresponding to it. Hence there have grown up large possibilities of confusion, voluntarily contrived and involuntarily, and for purposes of discrimination in these circumstances, whenever any given sign is put forward as implying there and then the existence of its sensory form in addition to the ideal, the terms true and erroneous have been made applicable. The feature to which they refer is the implied oneness and possibility of orderly extension and fulfilment of the mental form, with its corresponding external form. When these either blend or are capable of being blended in an unbroken unit the sign is a true sign; but when there is a break and a discrepancy the sign is erroneous. Hence the reference of error is not to existence but to the correspondence or otherwise of members of two different orders of existence, and no matter how extended or involved the sign-system may become, whenever we have to apply the terms error and erroneous the signification remains fundamentally the same.
(6) These concepts then: truth, error, reality, being, are not inscrutable mysteries: insoluble riddles: forced on man merely to engender in him a sickly and sentimental melancholy, but simple classification-cadres under which the great characterizing feature of the human powers can be subsumed in genuine conformity with their actual play. When a stringent definition has made the divisions sufficiently neat, all-comprehensive, and mutually exclusive, we are provided in these terms with adequate vehicles of. expression whereby men can explain to themselves their own nature and the significance of their most characteristic activity: that of revising and of interfering with their external environment. And because it is so we have the explanation of man's preoccupation with them. We understand why the cause of their untrammelled discussion has been able always to command its martyrdoms, and why, now even when the swift advance in the sphere of natural philosophy has given to their mere statement a
##March—April 1919 THE EGOIST 19
puerile sound, they have still been able to divert and monopolize the best energies of philosophy. Philosophy has had, in fact, no option but to stand to until they were settled, because otherwise no department of science could and basic security. Now, however, one would submit that the long life-term of these problems is at an end. They are done with because they can be stated coherently, and we can now push on beyond mere logical definition and classification to look for, and to devise means which will enable us to pick up in the external world, reverberations of these personal and individual motions of the mind. The problem from being purely logical becomes physical: our logic itself suggesting forms of investigation sufficiently advanced to create tasks for the hands. That is: the matters of the mind promise to advance from a merely logical to a real existence in the sense in which we have defined real. For the hint as to what sort of physical form we may expect these mental forces to assume, and hence what kind of mechanical contrivance we must devise in order to pick them up and examine them in an externalized medium, we must depend upon the quality of our preliminary logic. Wherefore it, is to be argued that metaphysics, otherwise a comprehensive logic, is the necessary introductory study to mental science as it is to any ordered science whatsoever. The questions involved in metaphysics have their proper place not after but before the physics either of mind or of external nature, and from this elementary metaphysical stage the secondary physical one derives its whole meaning and direction. Without it the whole superstructure of science hangs in the air, destitute of base and support: a condition of affairs intolerable to minds matured sufficiently to be even dimly aware of the mind's bent and function. Hence philosophy's preoccupation with metaphysics: a subject in which the problems of truth and error have loomed so large; hence, too, the feeling that the reduction of the problem of error in a coherent theory of truth amounts to nothing less than the rounding off of an entire intellectual epoch.
II
(7) Our view then of our task in relation to the problem of error is that we have to show why, the mode of generation of truth being what we assert it to be, we so often find that in place of the truth we are seeking there is foisted upon us error.
To help us in the accomplishing of our task let us examine the procedure which we adopt when we deliberately set ourselves the task of generating a new truth, and making light break in upon some given problem. In such a matter there will, no doubt, be individual idiosyncrasies, but the main lines, we think, will be common to all. In any event, if we give an account of our own procedure it will be open to each to mark what likenesses and differences it bears to his own. In the first place, we assemble all the ideas already possessed which seem germane with the subject under view. We might claim that at this stage we do not think in the higher meaning of thinking. It is, in fact, rather important at this stage to suspend thought proper: to defer the simplification desired: and be content merely to assemble just what ideas have already become associated with the question. Each one of these outstanding ideas admitting usually of description by a single term or phrase which we call a "heading," we now take each heading in turn and use it as one would a key on a keyboard. We press it under the influence of concentrated attention, and forthwith in connexion with each a whole chain of associated ideas runs itself into being. We do not think these chains into existence. We let them declare themselves automatically under the compulsion of their own impulse, for it is to be observed that just as the constitution of mind enables us to bring the image of some sensory object into mind by the mere enunciation of a name, so will attention fixed on the name of an idea bring into being a whole train of ideas which have become associated with the one. Obviously in these preliminary activities of the search for a new truth there is operative an economy of mental forces like that which operates in action which is more patently physical. Just as our sense of power over the forces of nature is measured by the increase in the number of complex operations which we can perform automatically, our sense of mental power increases as we find the bare mental enunciation of the symbol for a single idea sufficient to awaken a lengthening and more comprehensive chain of ideas. Thus, as we concentrate on each separate heading, the preliminary matter reels itself off, a slight hesitation appearing here and there as some one idea, instead of running itself out in a single line, bifurcates, and one has to choose at the instant between following the one rather than the other, leaving the latter to be picked up later under a heading of its own.
(8) The mental procedure, mainly automatic, which we have just described, amounts to a turning over of the mental stock: an industrious spadework: intended to revive and bring under the higher organic heats of consciousness, i.e. attention, certain picked ideal elements already in our possession. The reason why, at this stage, one makes it a principle to keep in abeyance the fact that our object is the fertilizing of some one of the revived ideas with some other so as to bring into existence a new idea, is to keep the balance of the mind even until sufficient matter has been revived as will answer our purpose. We want to revive just so much of our subject as will cover and take in ideas which represent the two extremes of the problem, and which are themselves quite clear. What we shall want to cull from the associated ideas revived is a new idea which will remove the unexplained fact: the unbridged gap: lying midway between the two, so that henceforth we can envisage the whole subject as unfolding itself in unbroken expression of the self-same organic power. We therefore take pains to retain the fine edge of the mind by discouraging attempts seeking too early to establish a conclusion in order that the delicate balance may be sustained until the mental soil has been adequately turned over. When this has been done and the notes cover a sufficiently comprehensive ideal area, we go through the whole rapidly so that all the ideas may be revived in what is practically a single mental unit. Perhaps it appears bulky, and we compress it by removing any duplications; we note any contradictions and square them, then go over the whole again; then we wait for that something to happen out of which the new light dawns. If the something does not happen, again we go through the notes, and again wait. If again nothing happens, we try to unearth more ideas which are relevant; then sweep the entire stock together again, and again wait. What is the nature of the happening for which we wait we have already described in the previous chapter on Truth. It is the fusion, independent of our will or desire, which effects itself between specific concepts in obedience to the affinitive forces existing between concepts just as it exists between things, and which declares itself somewhat more readily between the delicate organic substances which constitute thoughts than between the more sluggish organic substances which constitute matter.
(9) In saying that this fusion is beyond the control of our will as also beyond that of our industry we need to make very specific qualifications. Will and industry enter into the operation as important preliminary agencies, but they do not enter into the decisive operation. The situation runs parallel with that presented by a chemist experimenting with unfamiliar elements. His ingenuity and perseverance
##20 THE EGOIST March—April 1919
can bring about transforming discoveries in so far as these depend upon the bringing together of hitherto unassociated substances, or the bringing of them together under a new set of circumstances. But whether they combine or fail to, depends upon the affinities residing in the assembled elements themselves. So it is in the combinations which declare themselves between concepts. Whence it follows that the genius of discovery does not reside in a high capacity for taking pains, though as a matter of common observation it is evident that this capacity very often accompanies the quality of genius. Genius itself will consist in a combination of (a) a high power of grip (and therefore of concentrated attention, and therefore again of the higher heats which this entails) which will cause the ideal appearance concentrated upon more readily to show signs of disintegration into its constituent elements of" cause and effect (see preceding study), and of (b) a higher degree of sensitiveness which will make the organism aware in some vague but adequate way of the form of the causal action even while this is still in the process of disengaging itself from the apparent whole; and this prescience, often more fleeting than a breath, will yet serve to give a swerve to the train of associated elements our will and industry are engaged in reviving. The result is that among the revived elements a higher probability will obtain of an idea of the required type and form putting in an appearance, and so rendering more probable the taking place of the new, illuminating, simplifying combination. Genius is therefore a combination of organic strength and delicacy, whose joint effects constitute just those conditions which favour the breaking down of ideal forms into simpler categories of organic power.
(10) On this interpretation of the nature of the operation involved in truth-discovery we can, as it seems, readily dispose of any claims of the so-called Will to believe to be a helpful factor in the discovery of new truth. Indeed, that very necessity of suspending judgment: that very inhibition of speculation and belief: by which we enable ourselves to wait for the critical mental event is itself the negation of any Will to believe. All that we can will in the operation is, to work hard in the collecting of the revived mental elements and to endure patiently the restraining leash on our desire for the new truth, so that we may remain physically in that condition which most favours its advent. The new birth matures and escapes abortion by virtue of certain conditions which allow the fructifying forces favourable play: conditions which waiting and a submissive concentrated attending upon these same forces beyond our will best provide. In fact truth is not a value but an organic growth. Thinkers have been led to judge otherwise by their failure, as it seems to us, to see in the mental thing an essential oneness of substance with the external thing. They have been led to confuse all the movements of mind with mere wishing and willing: operations which, however important, yet do not exhaust the total of mental movements.
(11) This same interpretation composes also the differences which have gathered around the question whether truth and reality are made, or whether they are discovered. Obviously, according to our theory, the human mechanism first creates truth in the head, and thereafter discovers it: becomes alive to its existence: there. And having discovered the new mental thing, the organism then looks to its hands to construct: to make it: to realize it: in the external medium after the type of the mental original. Thus reality is made, but truth is discovered. A reality can be shaped to accord with any truly coherent mental form, but mental forms of the authentic type cannot shape, themselves merely in conformity with our pleasure or even our will. Their creation representing an organic growth, they depend upon the nature of the organism out of which they grow, upon the organism's evolutionary history, and the powers which that history has rendered immanent within it. Therefore the truth which we discover and the reality which we thereafter make are not affairs contrived in independence of us who discover and contrive them. They are merely the rendering explicit through the agencies of mind and hand of what the effort of the ages has made implicit in our entire flesh. Only by virtue of what the flesh of man embodies does man discover what is true and make what is real.
Ill
(12) Supposing for the moment then that our theory of truth is accurate: that the emergence of a new truth is one with a definite "physical" union obtaining between hitherto non-associated ideal elements; that the advent of a truth differs from mere guesswork and a hopeful questioning perhaps addressed to our experience as a chemical compound differs from a mechanical mixture; that the process is accompanied by attendant features—a sense of explosive shock as of a force escaping; a burst of light peculiar in quality which illumines the entire understanding; a general release of energy often sufficient to send a tremor through the whole body and excite it to a condition bordering on exaltation; ordinarily accompanied by an attendant and parallel word-structure which renders the truth self-annunciatory so that we find ourselves in the very instant of its appearance automatically uttering the phrase which describes it; accompanied above all by a sense of assuredness which, like the click of a lever in some mechanical contrivance, seems itself to declare the Tightness of the action: supposing these things to be so, then the explanation of the problem of error resolves itself obviously into saying why an event, sponsored with signs thus distinctive, can be masqueraded by a species of combination not of this fundamental kind, but which none the less is so able to impose upon us that we accept it as genuine. Obviously, we have to square with our theory the existence of those myths, those half-truths, and those apparently unrelieved errors which have been held as truths not merely by single minds but by entire races of peoples.
(13) We will assemble what seem to us the main influences tending not only to blunt the sense of awareness of the truth-announcing conditions when these are actually present, but also to inhibit the truth-creating forces and prevent their fructification taking place, and hence to prevent the obtaining of the significant conditions themselves. In the first place we draw attention to the influence of association. It has been held commonly that the associative activity was sufficient to explain anything which happens in relation to the birth of new truths. We have already given our reasons why we consider the forces of association quite inadequate for the explanation of new truth. We now claim, moreover, that they go a long way towards explaining the prevalence of error, since owing to the extremely high fluidity of ideal forms, the tendency is for all ideas—however incongruous in themselves—to flow together and form a unit whenever the constituent items of the whole have been ideally attended to under one and the same organic effort. Accordingly, the search for truth, which resolves itself into a search for causal connexions between the various elements of our experience, has to run counter to the accidental associative interattractions established by the experience of them under the chance contiguities of a personal time and space. Those causal attractions which are the effects of the order in which things have emerged as inverse expressions of the organic powers represented by the organism's sense-organs have to vie with the attractions established by their mere coexistent assemblage in the organism's indi-
##March—April 1919 THE EGOIST 21
vidual time-span; and when it is remembered how heavily cumulative is the effect of the emphasis which falls upon any salient unit when experienced under repeated efforts of attention, it becomes obvious how intimately soldered together the parts of an incongruous unit may become. So obvious is it indeed that one can understand how the labour of truth becomes largely the attempt to dissolve the accidental assemblages which have thus coagulated as units of appearance into elements related by a connexion more causal.
(14) It is this agglutinous, non-selective characteristic of association which goes far to explain the necessity for adopting an attitude of suspicion towards any too elaborate manoeuvring of the mental situation. All that it will stand, as far as association goes, is the dispassionate revival of the chain-like mental groups which appear related to the problem in question. Any other attitude not only weights the motions of the mind at a moment when both the delicacy of the operation enacted and the sensitiveness of awareness necessary for the organism to become conscious of its enactment demands above all else the most even balance and the finest edge on the mind, but it runs the risk of bringing into being formidable entities compounded of quite incongruous associated elements; and these recklessly created entities, besides fruitlessly diverting the searcher's energies to themselves, continue to obsess the mind and block the action of the truth-germinating forces until, after much waste labour, the superficial character of their cohesive force is discovered and their disintegration achieved. It is on this account, as we think, that a mind much experienced in the analysis of appearances into true causal connexions becomes imbued with a genuine fear of "constructed" theories: hypotheses wrongly so called. However, to us it does not seem that it is the making of hypotheses which constitutes the danger, but instead the masquerading of this absolutely essential mental process in the guise of the constructive guess. This is, one would think, that which would explain the Hypotheses non fingo of a Newton. That this particular kind of distrust may well be carried to excess is exemplified in Newton's own case, since a slight error in the statistics relative to the distance of the moon from the earth was sufficient to cause him to lay aside his theory of gravitation for a period of years, whereas a robuster faith in the intimations of his own mind might possibly have engendered in him rather a distrust of the statistics as then existing.
One might summarize the situation in this way: One seems to be struck with a feeling of a person's frivolity and incompetence when he begins to "construct" a theory about the nature of things, and this not because it is theory but because it is constructed theory. The theories which command the right species of trust—either their author's or that of others—are those which dawn in the mind of their own accord and in a manner peculiar to themselves, which approximates to that of organic growth.
In the constructed theory, on the other hand, the constructor has allowed himself to be misled by certain facts related to the association-processes: chief among which is the fact that a disintegrating idea is able to speed its own dissolution and simplification when it has the good fortune to be attended to in conjunction with some idea of action in the revived chains of associated ideas, which is of the same type as the idea of action, endeavouring to disengage itself from the complex disintegrating whole. Hence the more thoroughgoing the turnover of related ideas, the stronger is the chance of speeding up the appearance of the new truth. The procedure begins to swerve from the right track when, instead of waiting with a mind free from anxiety and prejudice for the elements of the dissolving idea to pounce automatically upon the right idea should it turn up the investigator begins to experiment with ideal combinations by adopting the attitude of mind "Perhaps it will be so-and-so"—or something else. This feverish guesswork is not merely futile in itself; it is actively destructive, inasmuch as it blunts and confuses that sensitiveness whose delicacy is the means whereby we become aware of the signs of authentic fusion as well as of the absence of them.
(15) Next to the contribution to the prevalence of error made by the association-features involved in the discovery of truth, we place that contributed by a second feature of the mechanics of knowing: the feature responsible for the human peculiarity of conduct or purposed action. Error in the case just considered we can say was due to the fact that the greatness of the investigator's desire for truth was such that he could not wait even for the advent of truth. In this second case, however, truth is missed precisely because it does not hold this first place in the affections, but is made subsidiary to, and its attractions exploited in, the interest of other ends.
In our theory of what knowledge is, the action of intellect is to effect a divorce between totalized appearances which instinct views as indivisible units. These apparent units we regard, however, as having been built up in the slow evolution of life-forms and compounded of the spatial responses or reactions of the organism's externally acting members to the substantial actions produced by the internally acting movements of the organism's sensory mechanism. The action of intellect—whose products are truth—is to reverse this evolutionary trend; that is, to set up the spatial action as the decisive initiating partner in the process, in response to which the substantial or sensory movement becomes the reaction; that is again, intellectual action views the universe as the coiled-up products of two arms of activity: one voluntary, the other involuntary; and of the two it seeks to make the voluntary or spatial arm competent to dictate the pace and fashion to the involuntary one. It seeks to place the initiative in the sway of our power to do while our power to sense is made to follow in its wake. For since we have to conceive life itself as the polarization of a single force into the substantial and spatial power-arms respectively, it is obvious that action originating in either pole will lead to corresponding reaction in the other. The crucial matter will be as to which possesses the initiative. During the long instinctive life period, the initiative resided in the sensory arm, while the spatial adjustments, though obligatory, were essentially reactions. Now, however, when the intellect has placed the initiative with the spatial arm, the substantial world has no option save to run down in obedience to measures taken by its spatially acting partner. Hence, intellect has made man the animal which does things: the animal which can devise a scheme of conduct. Thus man is moral by virtue of his intellectual endowment; his morality is a by-product of his power of intellect with its complementary manual power; and this fact that he can be inspired to do things and shape and reshape his conduct at the instigation of words puts temptation in the way of those who issue words. It tends to make the latter issue words conducive to a desired line of conduct rather than just those words which give expression to the events of mind. It tends to make authority propagandist, not to say charlatan. It pits the attractions of interested error against those of disinterested truth, and often the dull-wittedness: the mental inertness: of the mass of mankind allows to the interested error of its sharper members a very long run indeed.
(16) Especially so when the error is allied with an element of truth, as it usually is. Usually even the grossest doctrine is built up round some nucleus in regard to which the generality of men feel that assuredness of truth of which we have spoken. The exactions in the way of patience, restraint, and
##22 THE EGOIST March—April 1919
bard labour made by the effort to remain quite honest mentally over a long-sustained mental labour are exceedingly heavy. This is especially so when one is concerned with the placing of some great truth which involves a vast number of lesser but still important truths, since, while the central truth may be, and may ultimately prove itself to be, altogether sound, the interpretations of the related matter in which it is embedded may be in need of so much additional incubation that we shirk it and pad it together in a makeshift way and so cause the whole to present ultimately the appearance of error. In the flash of illumination already to hand, truth has run down one more rung towards simplicity, but has dragged much related material down with it; and to give the right interpretation to the latter the same generative process may have to repeat itself in respect of each lesser problem involved in it. Obviously this is likely to be a very slow business, and during all the time when one is blindly feeling for more light one is merely mumbling around and about the central idea. One may grasp a leading idea and have an unassailable conviction of its truth and proclaim it, and yet be aware of a deafening buzz of confusion arising from the disturbed mental matter about whose definite hang one has to say, to be strictly truthful, one does not know. The temptation to construct a tale which seems likely and feasible and trust to the quality of the initial truth to carry off the whole with an air of verisimilitude for the time being is great. Particularly is this so when the formulation has to do with subjects which, like existent philosophy, are not yet in a sufficiently developed grade to admit of step-by-step sensory appeals for corroboration. So we get myths: popular quick-culled versions of truths. To compel the brain to suffer perhaps over an extended period of years that irritating sough of confusion; to make the heart continue to maintain its strongest drive with seeming impotence against mere nebulousness; to keep the total forces of the organism which go to make interest, patient, restrained, and cheerful, while this confusion clears itself at its own rate, a flash at a time demands a soundness of nervous organization which is none too common. Hence, notwithstanding the toillessness of the actual birth of truths, the labour of developing and placing any new truth of wide significance is a heavy one. Bacon might very well complain of the heavy contrast between the royal ease with which we come into possession of single truths and play with thoughts, and the arduous toil which, in addition to the strain of waiting, has to be put in in order to get into our possession all the related and necessary subsidiary truths involved in an adequate interpretation.
(17) And even when the labour and patience which make the waiting process fruitful are forthcoming, it does not follow that any radical truth will necessarily emerge. Since every new truth consists of a disintegration of an apparent unit-form into the two forms of a sense movement and a spatial one, it follows that if the type of action to be done is so far out of keeping with the kind of action with the performing of which we are already acquainted, the disintegration will hang fire for want of a form or framework under which the fertilizing conception of the action can be grasped. Hence, a branch of thought advanced in itself and ready to develop will be held back because another branch, which if equally developed would yield the idea which in combination would produce the required simplification, is behindhand. In sum, therefore, in place of viewing the existence of myths and popular truth as a mystery or as an obstacle to our theory, we consider it extraordinary that with so many elements tending to make the search for truth go astray, these same myths and fractional truths contain so much truth in proportion to their quota of error.
(18) Finally, in view of the importance ascribed to the factor of waiting, in the acquisition of new truth, and the stricture upon haste and pressure which this implies, some attention needs to be given to a feature which most people would be inclined to push forward strenuously on the strength of their own personal experience. What we refer to is the fact that very commonly we find a hitherto elusive truth suddenly announcing itself just when one is pressed by circumstances, in such a way that the solution of the matter has become an affair of extreme urgency. The truth is wanted in a hurry and out of that hurry it often dawns. We explain this seeming discrepancy between our theory and observable fact by drawing a distinction between the mental conditions under which some new combination of truth takes place and the combining mental elements themselves: between the state not only of the mind but of the whole organism and the ideas (or movements) seething in the brain and interacting upon one another there. For the chemist this distinction between the conditions under which he arranges his experiments in the laboratory and the particular substances upon which he is experimenting would be too obvious to need drawing. So in the laboratory of the brain and the chemistry of ideas. There are obviously general "laboratory" conditions which favour the rapid disintegration and simplification of ideas there. Among these seems to be a refining of the blood-stream in general: this entailing an increased fluidity and hence of speed of flow. Now this very condition of the blood seems to be obtained under the influence of a certain modicum of fear, involving a certain additional pressure upon the heart; and in this happy condition we find ourselves surprised at the ease with which the simplifying ideas distil themselves out and present themselves to us. The intensifying beyond a point of this element of fear and pressure, however, actually reverses these conditions, and the blood becomes relatively congealed; whereupon the brain becomes—relatively also—a passive block. Insistent demands for a solution under these circumstances results in a reaction usually in keeping with our general temperament. Either we accept the situation and stoically acknowledge defeat for the moment, or we beat about wildly trying by guesswork to catch on to something which will temporarily save appearances. There is, however, a happy cross between the two in which a courage: an accession of strength to the heart: is born of despair. The influence of the cold sick depression of failure reacts upon the surcharge of pressure caused by fear, and the heart promptly converts the blood's condition back to a cool yet still high-charged fluidity enabling us to solve what an instant back we found insoluble. Truth obviously is begotten in a very delicate medium, and the weight of a thought more and less makes all the difference in the conditions entailing either success or failure. Many other trivial-seeming factors besides the pressure and rate of flow of blood cause patent differences: the balance of the spine, the temperature of the surrounding atmosphere, the way the light falls, and (when one's forces are worn down and partially demoralized) even such differences as are involved in the weight, the girth and material of the pen in one's hand. However, let the "laboratory" conditions be arranged to perfection; let also the fructifying ideas be to hand; even then the issue is pent up m the nature of these mental things: these ideas: themselves. The perfect conditions will cause them to simplify and run down an additional rung but what the appearances into which they will eventuate will be is beyond our arrangement Like the experimenter in a physical medium, we can arrange preliminaries, but when all that has been done, for the dénouement we have to watch and wait. </ab></div>
<div type="poetry">
<ab>##March-April 1919 THE EGOIST 23
POEMS*
By Richard Aldington DISDAIN
HAVE the gods then left us in our need Like base and common men? Were even the sweet grey eyes Of Artemis a lie,
The speech of Hermes but a trick. The glory of Apollonian hair deceit?
Desolate we move across a desolate land,
The high gates closed,
No answer to our prayer ;
Naught left save our integrity,
No murmur against Fate
Save that we are juster than the unjust gods,
More pitiful than they.
PROEM
Out of this turmoil and passion,
This implacable contest,
This vast sea of effort,
I would gather something of repose,
Some intuition of the inalterable gods,
Some Attic gesture.
Each day I grow more restless,
See the austere shape elude me,
Gaze impotently upon a thousand miseries
And still am dumb.
BOMBARDMENT
(Near Lens, 1917)
Four, days the earth was rent and torn
By bursting steel,
The houses fell about us;
Three nights we dared not sleep,
Sweating, and listening for the imminent crash
Which meant our death.
The fourth night every man, Nerve-tortured, racked to exhaustion, Slept, muttering and twitching, While the shells crashed overhead.
The fifth day there came a hush; We left our holes
And looked above the wreckage of the earth To where the white clouds moved in silent lines Across the untroubled blue.
DOUBT I
Can we, by any strength of ours, Thrust back this hostile world That tears us from ourselves, As a child from the womb, A weak lover from light breasts?
Is there any hope?
Can we believe
That not in wild perversity,
In blinding cruelty,
Has flesh torn flesh,
Has soul been torn from soul?
Must we despair!
Throw back upon the gods this taunt
That even their loveliest is at best
Some ineffectual He? * These poems are from two books which will appear in May: Images of War (12s. net), Beaumont Press, Charing Cross Road; and Images of Desire (2s. 6d. net), Elkin Mathews, Cork Street.
II
Sand in the gale whirls up,
Pricks and stifles our flesh,
Blinds and deafens our sense
So that we cannot hear
The crumbling downfall of the waves
Nor see the limpid sunlight any more.
But could we thrust from us
This threat, this misery,
Borrow the mountain's strength
As now its loneliness,
Hurl back this menace on itself,
Crush bronze with bronze—
Why, it would be as if some tall slim god,
Unburdened of his age-long apathy,
Took in his hand the thin horn of the moon
And set it to his lips
And blew sharp wild shrill notes
Such as our hearts, our lonely hearts,
Have yearned for in the dumb bleak silences.
III
Ah! Weak as wax against their bronze are we, Ah! Faint as reed-pipes by the waters' roar, And driven as land-birds by the vast sea-wind.
EPIGRAMS
I
Your mouth is fragrant as an orange-grove In April, and your lips are hyacinths, Dark, dew-wet, folded, petalled hyacinths Which my tongue pierces like an amorous bee.
II
Your body is whiter than the moon-white sea, More white than foam upon a rocky shore, Whiter than that white goddess born of foam.
POSSESSION
I must possess you utterly
And utterly must you possess me ;
So even if that dreamer's tale
Of heaven and hell be true
There shall be two spirits rived together
Either in whatever peace be heaven
Or in the icy whirlwind that is hell
For those who loved each other more than God—
So that the other spirits shall cry out:
"AM! Look how the ancient love yet holds to them
That these two ghosts are never driven apart
But kiss with shadowy kisses and still take
Joy from the mingling of their misty limbs!"
RESERVE
Though you desire me I will still feign sleep And check my eyes from opening to the day For as I lie, thrilled by your gold-dark flesh, I think of how the dead, my dead, once lay. </ab></div>
<div type="articles">
<ab>PERFORMANCES OF OLD MUSIC
Mr. Arnold Dolmetsch announces two performances of Old Music and Dances to be given at 6 Queen Square, Bloomsbury, on Wednesday afternoons, April 16 and 30, 1919, at 5.15 o'clock.
Mr. Dolmetsch having left London, such performances will be rare in future.
The price of subscriptions is One Guinea for the two concerts. Single Tickets, 10s. 6d. each. Applications to be sent in advance to Mr. Arnold Dolmetsch, "Jesses," Haslemere, Surrey. Tickets will not be sold at the door.
##24 THE EGOIST March—April 1919
THE FRENCH IDEA
BETWEEN October 1913 and October 1914 M. Paul Claudel wrote a drama in three acts. When an author adopts the form of expression suited to stage-interpretation you suppose his intention was to be interpreted. Nevertheless, four years have passed, the theatres have been working almost without interruption, the managers are making, so we are informed, more money than ever before in their careers, the programmes they display seem to suggest that good new plays are as rare as butter, yet Paul Claudel's three acts* appear in book form, which is not the proper form in which their novelty should reach the public.
This is one of the riddles one has to fight with every day God brings. I want to know why the surprise of a new work written by Paul Claudel for the stage is not reserved for the stage? I want to know why Paul Claudel does not personify, at the Comédie Française, the present as in that same house Corneille and Racine personify the past? I do not even ask that his work should be substituted for that of MM. Bernstein and de Croisset; I only ask why, if these latter are esteemed the modern equivalents of Molière and Marivaux, Claudel cannot balance Corneille and Racine?
And if the Comédie Française— where Mme. Lara, that beautiful artist (and beautiful woman), has just been discharged, and whose doors are more or less closed to M. de Max and Mme. Moreno—has its reasons for excluding from its repertory so eminently "stage-able" a play as is Le Pain Dur, then why is no other hospitality available? L'Otage, when given at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier some years ago, was a vast success, and it cannot be contended that Claudel is expressive of anything particularly "anti," except anti-vulgar and anti-commonplace. I do not see that he can mean a danger to anybody. He is not personally associated with any obtrusive sect or party, and his convictions are neither revolutionary nor reactionary in any very special sense. Every one may assume Claudel for one reason or another.
The three acts of Le Pain Dur answer to the most conventional demands that can be made upon a theatrical performance; that is to say, its performance would be as exactly justified as a work written for the stage can be.
The five characters composing the dramatis personœ of Le Pain Dur call for actors as imperatively as the characters in Hamlet or The Merchant of Venice (which is again going to be given in the Parisianized version by M. Nepoty, God permitting). Nothing vaporous here. They "are types at once general and particular. They are as unambiguous as Claudel the writer is unambiguous. This is Claudel's great virtue in an age of literary deceptions. He is as unambiguous as the great ones in the past whose words hid but one meaning at a time, though they lie at the very bottom of a long strata of meanings. Claudel, whether you like him or not, you cannot deny, rings true. It is the full sound of metal without alloy.
The brevity of these chronicles and the long intervals at which they appear make it advisable to recommend ampler sources of information. I would quite particularly counsel subscription to L'Art, published at 5 bis Eue Schœlcher, Paris, XIVe, the annual foreign subscription price being 3 fr. 50. Its four pages accomplish what it is quite vain even to attempt in this short column, that is, to be at once a calendar and a comment of the latest achievements and directions of extremely busy, effervescent, and mobile energies, both individual and collective.
* Le Pain Dur, par Paul Claudel. Editions de la Nouvelle Reime Française, 4 fr.
The December number of L'Art, for instance, would have told you about the last, the last but one there is always another (the Puriste, for example)— school in painting, L'Ecole de Triel; about the performances of the Art de Liberté dramatic group; about Paul Méral's play at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, Les Bits des Jeux du Monde, with music by A. Honegger, costumes and dances by A. Fauconnet; about the interesting matinées due to the perseverance of M. E. Figuière, given by the Comité d'Initiative Artistique at the Odéon; in fact, would keep you versed in the campaign against officialdom. A metaphysical essay by O. W. de Lubisz-Miloscz, an article on the Berrichon sculptor, Jean Baffler, and various prose and poetry contributions were important original features. An earlier issue in honour of Henry de Groux was an excellent barometrical indication, as the influence of M. Carlos Larronde, the editor, has been from the outset. Those who understand, understood what to expect. (For we are growing more and more suspicious of deceptive nomenclature and epithet. I am glad to say that that most artful and misleading of terms, "sincere," used and abused in art and literature of late years, is not hawked about until its very sound makes you blush.) The first number gave confidence. This confidence has been encouraged by the last issue to hand.
It should be noted also that a new monthly, Le Monde Nouveau, edited by MM. Paul Fort and Charles Daniélou, will be published in French and English by Figuière, 7 Rue Corneille, Paris. The annual subscription price is 18s. or $4. Messrs. H. Wickham Steed and Herbert Adams Gibbons will be responsible for the British and American sections.
Muriel Ciolkowska
HELLENIST SERIES
By Ezra Pound VI
ALL the Greek tragedians hover on the borders of rhetoric, even iEschylus; Pindar is a pompier, and his 'Ava^àpfjnyyes vjxvoi. etc., ought to be sent to the dust-bin along with. Shelley's Sensitive Plant. The harm done by pedants yapping about the glory that was this and the grandeur that was the other; telling impressionable small boys that all Greek is literature and all Latin is jurisprudential, is incalculable. The classics which are deathless, which are freedom, in which are the perfect models, have done as much harm to writing as many faddists, because of this indiscriminate attitude. I know as the merest of minor details that my prose was held back three years because I had read some gush of MacKail's over Tacitus.
There is no hint, suspicion, implication, glimmer, in the works of any of the "scholars" that a language without case-inflections and complicatedverbal-endings cannot, cannot be handled as one handles, should handle, a language furnished with these tabs and labels.
Even AEschylus is, in places, rhetorical, as I do not think Homer is rhetorical. Aristophanes was needed as an acid for Euripides. Sappho's "iWiXdöpoi/," made of perfect sound and exceeding passion, is the unsurpassable melody, but is not on that account, of necessity, a model for modern writing. The crowns, wreaths, palmes académiques, etc., should be removed from all the poetic statues at least twice in each century, and only put back when a new generation finds the work glorious and moving and indispensable.
Ovid writes excellently at times: he is at the heart of the mystery, and knows the Gods as Homer did not even know they were knowable: Ovid's cadence is overapt to be trivial. Catullus's Peleus and Thetis##
March—April 1919 THE EGOIST 25
is perhaps the best piece of sustained narration, or narrative imagery, in all Latin.
Horace is a peculiarity, AEolicos modos perhaps, but the more Greek a man knows the less he is apt to like Horace; technique in abundance, but can we honestly glow with pleasure on reading:
"Maecenas sprung from a line of (highly questionable) kings "
Horace was "the first Parnassien," or the first Royal Academy. He is better than Samain and Heredia; I question if he was so good a poet as Gautier. He was as good as Lionel Johnson. Yet he is unique in Latin poetry, where only Catullus has surpassed him in metric— Propertius excelling in only one metre.
However, there will be no end of people writing about "Theban eagles" and perverting the taste of small boys.
It may be argued, though not quite fairly or conclusively, that the Greek dramatists are a decadence from Homer. But the plainer passages of AEschylus are untouchable, even as writing, and he obviously knew certain things about his art which were unknown to Homer (or to Peisistratus).
There is nothing in these hatchetings inconsistent with a recognition that Ovid is so uneven, so faulty, that a reader coming first upon the wrong pages might easily be put off altogether. There is in him an art of writing which does not, or let us say qualities which do not appear in the Greek—doubtless of slow growth; but the qualities "appear" in Ovid, perhaps because he is the first enjoyable and readable writer who possessed them.
If we do not read the classics in the same spirit of "readiness to judge" wherein we read Rimbaud and Corbière, they become mere Nelson Columns, mere monuments in the landscape—deader, indeed, than stone columns.
Golding's English of the Metamorphoses is on the whole, I think, quite as good as the Latin; some passages, naturally, being better in the original, some not so pleasing. I am not sure that Golding gives, in fact I am fairly sure that he does not give, the sense of skilled joinery which one gets from Ovid's Latin.
But there is no surer way of burying the classics, of driving them out of currency, than by maintaining the pedagogues' pretence that all Greek and Latin is interesting, that every line of Horace is poetry, that Virgil is always an excitement.
The bulk of the "standard" Latin and Greek poets is so small that we should not, perhaps, object to having them in complete editions. Little selections of "Cento migliore liriche" are unsatisfactory; but there is no sense in implying that the whole of a given poet is equally valuable, that one should never murmur against him for dullness.
By such an attitude the Latins are like to become a fetish, like that bundle of Hebrew rubbish which people still kiss in the law courts.
(Out of every two million sots who possess this latter work, on japan vellum or other, there are not three readers who have tried to sort out the poetry and the literature from the claptrap.)
It is, of course, unfortunate that men can make a living out of "religion," i.e. out of professing a formula, and it is equally damnable that literature is instilled—or rather, bandied about—for the most part, by "teachers" who do not care a curse for the subject, who are paid to keep order in classrooms (underpaid, perhaps, economically, but paid more than keeping order is worth), but who would not increase their screw by having an opinion, who therefore do not have opinions.
I am inclined to wail for the days—for the year 1759 to be exact—when there appeared
Ovid's Epistles, translated into English Verse; with Critical Essays and Notes. Being part of a Poetical and Oratorical Lecture, read in the Grammar-School of Ashford, in the County of Kent, and calculated to initiate Youth in the first Rudiments of Taste. By St. Barrett, A.M., Master of the said School. (London for J. Eichardson, in Pater-noster Eow. m.dcc.lix.)
The golden labour of barbarian hands (" Medea to Jason," i. 73)
is worth the shilling it cost me.
Among the translations of AEschylus's Prometheus Bound I find nothing in English which greatly improves on the hack-work in Bohn; the Italian scholar is perhaps better rewarded by the version of Felice Bellotti published in 1821. The stupendous opening is not utterly ruined by him.
AESCHYLUS (Translation by Felice Bellotti)
PEOMETEO LEGATO Il Potere Giunti siam della terra alle remote Contrade estreme, alle inaccesse vie Delia Scizia déserta. A te, Vulcano, Sta l'esseguir ciô che t'impose il padre: Questo audace malvagio ad erta rupe Stringer con saldi adamantini ceppi; Ch'ei furo la tua dote, il radiante Foco, di tut te arti ministro, e un doni A 'mortali ne fece. Or dee la pena Scontarne ai numi, onde acquetarsi apprenda All 'impero di Giove, e dal soverchio Amor ritrasi dell 'umana schiatta.
Vulcano
Per voi, Forza e Poter, di Giove il cenno Compiuto è gia, nè che più far vi resta: Ma io saldo legar su procellosa Scoscesa balza un consanguineo nume, Ah! non ni regee il core. E cor che basti, Necessario ni è pur; poi che del padre Trasandar la parola è grave cosa.— O di Terni figliuol, pieno la mente D'alto saper, mal mio grado io t'affligo A nodi indissolubili di ferro Qui su questo dirupo inospitale Ove nè umana udrai voce, nè umano Volto vedrai. Dalla fiammante lampa Del Sole arso, abbronzato, andrai cangiando Il fior dell sembianze. Sospirata Sempre la notte occultera la luce Con lo stellato annuanto, e il Sol di nuovo Dissipera dell 'alba la ruggiada: E tu d'affanno ognor ti struggerai, Nè sarà chi t'aUevii. E questo il frutto Dell 'amor de 'mortali, a qui volesti Esser di troppo liberal, de 'numi Non temendo lo saegno: onde qui steso, Sempre a guardia starai di questo sasso, Senza ne al sonno dechinar palpebra, Ni ginocchio piegar. Molti sospiri, Moite, ma nidarno, metterai querele: Inesorato è il cor di Giove; e sempre Aspro è colui che di récente impera.
Il Potere Sia: ma che indulgi, è pietà vana accogli? Che non odii tu pur questo agli dei Odiosissimo dio, che lo tuo pregio Diede agli umani a tradimento?
Vulcano E il comun sangue forte e l'amistà
Il Potere
Nol niego. Ma sordo rimaner di Giove ai detti, Corne si puo? Non hai di lui più tema?
##26 THE EGOIST March—April 1919
Vulcano
Sempre tu dispietato, e fiero sempre!
Il Potere Non è rimedio il piangerlo. Non darti In far cio che non giova. Inutil pena.
Vulcano
Oh ministero mio, quanto io ti abhorro! </ab></div>
<div type="fiction">
<ab>ULYSSES
By James Joyce Episode III
INELUCTABLE modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them, bodies, before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.
Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrrack and shells. You are walking through it howsomeever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six: the Nacheinander. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetles o'er his base, fell through the Nebeneinander ineluctably I am getting on nicely in the dark. My ash sword hangs at ray side. Tap with it: they do. My two feet in his boots are at the end of my two legs, nebeneinander. Sounds solid: made by the mallet of Los demiurgos. Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand? Crush, crack, crick, crick. Wild sea money. Dominie Deasy kens them a'.
Won't you come to Sandymount, Madeline the mare?
Rhythm begins, you see. I hear. Catalectic tetrameter of iambs marching. No, agallop: decline the mare.
Open your eyes now. I will. One moment. Has all vanished since? If I open and am for ever in the black adiaphana! Basta. I will see if I can see.
See now. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end.
Airs romped around him, nipping and eager airs. They are coming, waves. The whitemaned seahorses, champing, brightwindbridled.
I mustn't forget his letter for the press. And after? The Ship, half twelve. By the way go easy with that money like a good young imbecile. Yes, I must.
His pace slackened. Here. Am I going to Aunt Sara's or. not? My consubstantial father's voice. Did you see anything of your artist brother Stephen lately? No? Sure he's not down in Strasburg terrace with his aunt Sally? Couldn't he strike a bit higher than that, eh? And and and and tell us Stephen, how is uncle Si? O. weeping God, the things I married into! De boys up in de hayloft. The drunken little costdrawer and his brother, the cornet player. Highly respectable gondoliers! And skeweyed Walter sirring his father, no less! Sir. Yes, sir. No, sir. Jesus wept: and no wonder, by Christ!
I pull the wheezy bell of their shuttered cottage: and wait. They take me for a dun, peer out from a coign of vantage.
—It's Stephen, sir.
—Let him in. Let Stephen in.
A bolt drawn back and Walter welcomes me.
—We thought you were someone else.
In his broad bed uncle Richie, pillowed and blanketed, extends over the hillock of his knees a sturdy forearm. Cleanchested. He has washed the upper moity.
—Morrow, nephew.
He lays aside the lapboard whereon he drafts his bills of costs for the eyes of Master Goff and Master Tandy, filing consents and common searches and a writ of Duces Tecum. A bogoak frame over his bald head: Wilde's Requiescat. The drone of his misleading whistle brings Walter back.
—Yes, sir?
—Malt for Richie and Stephen, tell mother. Where is she?
—Bathing Crissie, sir. Papa's little lump of love. —No, uncle Richie . . . —Call me Richie. Whusky! —Uncle Richie, really . . .
—Sit down or by the law Harry I'll knock you down.
Walter squints vainly for a chair.
—He has nothing to sit down on, sir.
—He has nowhere to put it, you mug. Bring in our Chippendale chair. Would you like a bite of something? None of your damned lawdeedaw airs here; a rasher fried with a herring? Sure? So much the better. We have nothing in the house but backache pills.
All' erta!
He drones bars of Ferrando's aria di sortita. The grandest number Stephen, in the whole opera. Listen.
His tuneful whistle sounds again, finely shaded, with rushes of air, his fists bigdrumming on his padded knees.
This wind is sweeter.
Houses of decay, mine, his and all. You told the Clongowes gentry you had an uncle a judge and an uncle a general in the army. Come out of them, Stephen. Beauty is not there. Nor in the stagnant bay of Marsh's library where you read the fading prophecies of Joachim Abbas. For whom? The hundredheaded rabble of the cathedral close. A hater of his kind ran from them to the wood of madness, his mane foaming in the moon, his eyeballs stars. Houyhnhnm, horsenostrilled. The oval equine faces, Temple, Buck Mulligan, Foxy Campbell, Lantern jaws. Abbas father, furious dean, what offence laid fire to their brains. Paff! Descende, calve, ut ne amplius decalveris. A garland of grey hair on his comminated head see him now clambering down to the footpace, (descende), clutching a monstrance, basiliskeyed. Get down, baldpoll! A choir gives back menace and echo, assisting about the altar's horns, the snorted Latin of jackpriests moving burly in their albs, tonsured and oiled and gelded, fat with the fat of the kidneys of wheat.
And at the same instant perhaps a priest round the corner is elevating it. Dringdring! And two streets off another locking it into a pyx. Dringadring! And in a ladychapel another taking housel all to his own cheek. Dringdring! Down, up, forward back. Occam thought of that, invincible doctor. A misty English morning the imp tickled his brain. Bringing his host down and kneeling he heard twine with his second bell the first bell in the transept (he is lifting his) and, rising, heard (now I am lifting) their two bells (he is kneeling) twang in diphthong.
Cousin Stephen, you will never be a saint. Isle of saints. You were awfully holy, weren't you? You prayed to the Blessed Virgin that you might not have a red nose. You prayed to the devil in
##March—April 1919 THE EGOIST 27
Serpentine avenue that the buxom widow in front might lift her clothes still more from the wet street. O si, certo! Sell your soul for that, do, dyed rags pinned round a squaw. More tell me, more still! On the top of the Hewth tram alone crying to the rain: naked women! naked women! What about that, eh!
What about what? what else were they invented for?
Reading two pages apiece of seven books every night eh? I was young. You bowed to yourself in the mirror, stepping forward to applause earnestly, striking face. Hurray for the Goddamned idiot! Hray! No-one saw: tell no-one. Books you were going to write with letters for titles. Have you read his F? O yes, but I prefer Q. Yes, but W is wonderful. O yes, W. Remember your epiphanies on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria? Someone was to read them there after a few thousand years, a mahamanvantara. Pico della Mirandola like. Ay, very like a whale. When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once . . .
The grainy sand had gone from under his feet. His boots trod again a damp crackling mast, razorshells, squeaking pebbles, that on the unnumbered pebbles beats, wood sieved by the ship-worm, lost armada. Unwholesome sandflats waited to suck his treading soles, breathing upward sewage breath. He coasted them, walking warily. A porter-bottle stood up, pitted to its waist, in the cakey sand dough. A sentinel: isle of dreadful thirst. Broken hoops on the shore; at the land a maze of dark cunning nets; farther away chalkscrawled backdoors and on the higher beach a dryingline with two crucified shirts. Ringsend: wigwams of brown steersmen and master mariners. Human shells.
He halted. I have passed the way to aunt Sara's. Am I not going there? Seems not. No-one about. He turned northeast and crossed the firmer sand towards the Pigeonhouse.
—Qui vous a mis dans cette fichue position?
—C'est le pigeon, Joseph.
Patrice, home on furlough, lapped warm milk with me in the bar MacMahon. Son of the wild goose, Kevin Egan of Paris. My father's a bird, he lapped the sweet lait chaud with pink young tongue, plump bunny's face. Lap, lapin. He hopes to win in the gros lots. About the nature of women he read in Michelet. But he must send me La Vie de Jésus by Mr Léo Taxil. Lent it to his friend.
—C'est tordant, vous savez. Moi, je suis socialiste. Je ne crois, pas à l'existence de Dieu. Faut pas le dire à mon pére.
—Il croit?
—Mon pére, oui.
Schluss. He laps.
My Latin quarter hat. God, we simply must dress the character. I want puce gloves. You were a student, weren't you? Of what in the other devil's name? Paysayenn. P. C. N., you know: physiques, chimiques et naturelles. Aha. Eating your groats-worth of mou en civet, fleshpots of Egypt, elbowed by belching cabmen. Just say in the most natural tone: when I was in Paris I used to. Yes, used to carry punched tickets to prove an alibi if they arrested you for murder somewhere. Justice. On the night of the seventeenth of February 1904 the prisoner was seen by two witnesses. Other fellow did it: other me. Hat, tie, overcoat, nose. Lui, c'est moi. You seem to have enjoyed yourself.
Proudly walking. Whom were you trying to walk like? Forget: a dispossessed. With mother's money order, eight shillings, the barrier of the post office shut in your face by the usher. Hunger toothache. Encore deux minutes. Look clock. Must get. Fermé. Hired dog! Shoot him to bloody bits with a bang shot-gun, bits man spattered walls all brass buttons. Bits all khrrrklak in place clack back. Not hurt? O, that's all right. Shake hands. See what I meant, see? O, that's all right. Shake a shake. O, that's all only all right.—
You were going to do wonders, what? Missionary to Europe after fiery Columbanus. Pretending to speak broken English as you dragged your valise, porter threepence, across the slimy pier at Newhaven. Comment? Rich booty you brought back; five tattered numbers of Pantalon Blanc et Culotte Rouge; a blue French telegram, curiosity to show:
—Mother dying come home father.
The aunt thinks you killed your mother. That's why she won't.
—Then here's a health to Mulligan's aunt And I'll tell you the reason why. She always kept things decent in The Hannigan famileye.
His feet marched in sudden proud rhythm over the sand furrows, along by the boulders of the south wall. He stared at them proudly, piled stone mammoth skulls. Gold light on sea, on sand, on boulders. The sun is there, the slender trees, the lemon houses.
Paris rawly waking, crude sunlight on her lemon streets. Moist pith of farls of bread, the froggreen wormwood, her matin incense, court the air. Pelluomo rises from the bed of his wife's lover's wife, the kerchiefed housewife is astir, a saucer of acetic acid in her hand. In Rodot's Yvonne and Madeleine newmake there tumbled beauties, shattering with gold teeth chaussons of pastry, their mouths yellowed with the pus of flan breton. Faces of Paris men go by, their well pleased pleasers, curled conquistadores.
Noon slumbers. Kevin Egan rolls gunpowder cigarettes through fingers smeared with printer's ink, sipping his green fairy as Patrice his white. About us gobblers fork spiced beans down their gullets. Un demi setier! A jet of coffee steam from the burnished caldron. She serves me at his beck. Your postprandial, do you know that word? Postprandial. There was a fellow I knew once in Barcelona, queer fellow, used to call it his postprandial. Well: slâinte! Around the slabbed tables the tangle of wined breaths and grumbling gorges. His breath hangs over our saucestained plates, the green fairy's fang thrusting between his lips. Of Ireland, the Dalcassians, of hopes, conspiracies, of Arthur Griffith now. To yoke me as his yokefellow, our crimes our common cause. His fustian shirt, sanguineflowered, trembles its Spanish tassels at his secrets. Mr Drumont, famous journalist, Drumont, know what he called queen Victoria? Old hag with the yellow teeth. Vieille ogresse with the dents jaunes. Maud Gonne, la Patrie, Mr Mülevoye, Felix Faure, know how he died? Licentious men. The froeken who rubbed his nakedness in the bath at Upsala. Moi faire, she said. Tous les Messieurs. Most licentious custom. Bath a most private thing. I wouldn't let my brother, not even my own brother, most lascivious thing. Green eyes, I see you. Fang, I feel. Lascivious people.
The blue fuse burns deadly between hands and burns clear. Loose tobaccoshreds catch fire: a flame and acrid smoke lights our corner. Raw facebones under his peep of day boy's hat. How the head centre got away, true version. Got up as a young bride, man, veil, orangeblossoms, drove out the road to Malahide. Did, faith. Of lost leaders, the betrayed, wild escapes. Disguises, clutched at, gone, not here.
Spurned lover. I was a strapping young gossoon at that time, I tell you. I'll show you my likeness one day. I was faith. Lover, for her love he prowled wdth colonel Richard Burke, tanist of his sept, under the walls of Clerkenwell and, crouching, saw a flame of vengeance hurl them upward in the fog. Shattered
##28 THE EGOIST March—April 1919
glass and toppling masonry. In gay Paree he hides, Egan of Paris, unsought by any save by me. Making his day's stations, the dingy printingcase, his three taverns, the lair in Butte Montmartre he sleeps short night in rue de la Goutte d'Or, damascened with flyblown faces of the gone. Loveless, landless, wifeless. She is quite nicey comfy without her outcast man, madame, in rue Git-le-Cœur, canary and two buck lodgers. Peachy cheeks, a zebra skirt, frisky as a young thing! Spurned and undespairing. Mon fils, soldier of France. I taught him to sing The hoys of Kilkenny are stout roaring blades. Know that old lay? I taught Patrice that. Old Kilkenny: saint Canicc, Strongbow's castle on the Nore. Goes like this. O, O. He takes me, Napper Tandy, by the hand.
—O, O the boys of Kilkenny . . .
Weak wasting hand on mine. They have forgotten Kevin Egan, not he them. Remembering thee, O Sion.
He had come nearer the edge of the sea and wet sand slapped his boots. The new air greeted him, harping in wild nerves, wind of wild air of seeds of brightness, Here, I am not walking out to the Kish lightship, am I? He stood suddenly, his feet beginning to sink slowly in the quaking soil. Turn back.
Turning, he scanned the shore south, his feet sinking again slowdy in new sockets. The cold domed room of the tower waits. Through the barbacans the shafts of light are moving ever, slowly ever as my feet are sinking, creeping duskward over the dial floor. Blue dusk, nightfall, deep blue night. In the darkness of the dome they wait, their pushedback chairs, my obelisk valise, around a board of abandoned platters. Who to clear it? He has the key. I will not sleep there when this night comes. A shut door of a silent tower entombing their blind bodies, the panthersahib and his pointer. Call: no answer. He lifted his feet up from the suck and turned back by the mole of boulders. Take all. My soul walks with me, form of forms. So in the moon's mid-watches I pace the path above the rocks, in sable silvered, hearing Elsinore's tempting flood.
The flood is following me. I can watch it flow past from here. Get back then by the Poolbeg road to the strand there. He climbed over the sedge and eely oarweeds and sat on a stool of rock, resting his ashplant by him.
A bloated carcase of a dog lay lolled on bladder-wrack. Before him the gunwale of a boat, sunk in sand. Un coche ensablé Louis Veuillot called Gautier's prose. These heavy sands are language tide and wind have silted here. And these, the stoneheaps of dead builders, a warren of weasel rats. Hide gold here. Try it. You have some. Sands and stones. Heavy of the past. Sir lout's toys. Mind you don't get one bang on the ear. I'm the bloody well gigant rolls all them bloody well boulders, bones for my stepping-stones. Feefawfum. I zmellz de bloodz odz an Iridzman.
A point, live dog, grew into sight running across the sweep of sand. Lord, is he going to attack me? Respect his liberty. You will not be master of others or their slave. I have my stick. Sit tight. From farther away, walking shoreward across from the crested tide, figures, two. The two maries. They have tucked it safe mong the bulrushes. Peekaboo. I see you. No, the dog. He is running back to them. Who?
Galleys of the Lochlanns ran here to beach, in quest of prey, their bloodbeaked prows riding low on a molten pewter surf. Dane vikings, torcs of tomahawks aglitter on their breasts when Malachi wore the collar of gold. A school of turlehide whales stranded in hot noon, spouting, hobbling in the shallows. Then from the starving cagework city a horde of jerkined dwarfs, my people, with flayers' knives, running, scaling, hacking in green blubbery whalemeat. Famine, plague and slaughters. Their blood is in me, their lusts my waves. I moved among them on the frozen Liffey, that I, a changeling, among the spluttering resin fires. I spoke to no-one; none to me.
The dog's bark ran toward him, stopped, ran back. Dog of my enemy. I just simply stood pale, silent, bayed about. Terribilia meditans. A primrose doublet, fortune's knave, smiled on my fear. For that are you pining, the bark of their applause? Pretenders: live their lives. The Bruce's brother, Thomas Fitzgerald, silken knight, Perkin Warbeck, York's false scion, in breeches of silk of whiterose ivory, wonder of a day, and Lambert Simnel, a scullion crowned. All kings' sons. Paradise of pretenders then and now. He saved men from drowning and you shake at a cur's yelping. But the courtiers who mocked Guido in Or san Michèle were in their own house. House of . . . We don't want any of your medieval abstrusiosities. Would you do what he did? A boat would be near, a lifebuoy. Natürlich, put there for you. Would you or would you not? The man that was drowned nine days ago off Maiden's rock. They are waiting for him now. The truth, spit it out. I would want to. I would try. I am not a strong swimmer. Water cold soft. When I put my face into it in the basin at Clongowes. Out quickly, quickly! Do you see the tide flowing quickly in on all sides, sheeting the beds of sand quickly, shell-cocoacoloured? If I had land under my feet. I want his life still to be his, mine to be mine. A drowning man. His human eyes scream to me out of horror of his death. I . . . With him together down ... I could not save her. Waters: bitter death: lost.
A woman and a man. I see her skirties. Pinned up, I bet.
Their dog ambled about a bank of dwindling sand, trotting, sniffing on all sides. Looking for something lost in a past life. Suddenly he made off like a bounding hare, ears flung back, chasing the shadow of a lowskimming gull. The man's shrieked whistle struck his limp ears. He turned, hounded back, came nearer, trotted on twinkling shanks. On a field tenney a buck trippant, proper, unattired. At the lacefringe of the tide he halted with stiff forehoofs, seawardpointed ears. His snout lifted barked at the wave-noise. They serpented towards his feet, curling, unfurling many crests, every ninth, breaking, plashing, from far, from farther out, waves and waves.
Cocklepickers. They waded a little way in the water and, stooping, soused their bags, and, lifting them again, waded out. The dog yelped running to them, reared up and pawed them, dropping on all fours, again reared up at them with mute bearish fawning. Unheeded he kept by them as they came towards the drier sand, a rag of wolf's tongue redpanting from his jaws. His speckled body ambled ahead of them and then set off at a calf's gallop. The carcase lay on his path. He stopped, sniffed, stalked round it, brother, nosing closer, went round it, sniffling rapidly, dogsniff, eyes on the ground, moves to one great goal. Ah poor dogsbody! Here lies dogsbody's body.
—Tatters! Out of that you mongrel!
The cry brought him skulking back to his master and a blunt bootless kick sent him unscathed across a spit of sand, crouched in flight. He slunk back in a curve. Doesn't see me. Along by the edge of the mole he dawdled, smelt a rock. Something he buried there, his grandmother. He rooted in the sand, dabbling and delving and stopped to listen to the air; scraped up the sand again with a fury of his claws, soon ceasing, a pard, a panther, got in spouse-breach, vulturing the dead.
##March—April 1919 THE EGOIST 29
After he woke me up last night same dream or was it? Wait. Open hallway. Street of harlots. Eemember. I am almosting it. That man led me, spoke. I was not afraid. The melon he had he held against my face. Smiled: creamfruit smell. That was the rule said. In. Come. Red carpet spread. You will see who.
Shouldering their bags they passed. His blued feet out of turned-up trousers slapped the clammy sand, a dull red muffler strangling his unshaven neck. With woman steps she followed: the ruffian and his strolling mort, spoils at her back. Loose sand and shellgrit crusted her bare feet. About her windraw face her hair trailed. Behind her lord his helpmate, trudging to Romeville. When night hides her body's flaws calling under her brown shawl from an archway where dogs have mired. Her fancyman is treating two Royal Dublins in O'Loughlin's of Blackpitts. Buss her, wap in rogues' rum lingo, for, O, my dimber wapping dell. A shefiend's whiteness under her rancid rags. Fumbally's lane that night: the tanyard smells.
White thy fambles, red thy gan And thy quarrons dainty is Couch a hogshead with me then: In the darkmans clip and kiss.
Morose delectation Aquinas tunbelly calls this, frate porcospino. Call away let him: thy quarrons dainty is. Language no whit worse than his. Monk-words, marybeads jabber on their girdles: rogue-words, tough nuggets patter in their pockets.
Passing now.
A side-eye at my Hamlet hat. If I were suddenly naked here as I sit? I am not. Across the sands of all the world, followed by the sun's flaming sword, to the west, to evening lands. She trudges, schlepps, trains, drags, trascines her load. A tide westering, moondrawn, in her wake. Tides, myriadislanded, within her, blood not mine, oinopa ponton, a winedark sea. Behold the handmaid of the moon. In sleep the wet sign calls her hour, bids her rise. Bridebed, childbed, bed of death, ghostcandled. Omnis caro ad te veniet. He comes, pale vampire, through storm his eyes, his bat sails bloodying the sea, mouth to her mouth's kiss.
Here. Put a pin in that chap, will you? My tablet. Mouth to her kiss. No. Must be two of em. Glue em well. Mouth to her mouth's kiss.
His lips lipped and mouthed fleshless lips of air: mouth to her moomb. Oomb, allwombing tomb. His mouth moulded issuing breath, unspeeched: ooeeehah: roar of cataractic planets, globed, blazing, roaring wayawayawayawayawayaway. Paper. The banknotes, blast them. Old Deasy's letter. Here. Thanking you for the hospitality tear the blank end off. Turning his back to the sun he bent over far to a table of rock and scribbled words. That's twice I forgot to take slips from the library counter.
His shadow lay over the rocks as he bent, ending. Why not endless till the farthest star? Darkly they are there behind this light, darkness shining in the brightness, delta of Cassiopeia, worlds. Me sits there with his augur's rod of ash, in borrowed sandals, by day beside a livid sea, unbeheld, in violet night walking beneath a reign of uncouth stars. I throw this ended shadow from me, call it back. Endless, would it be mine, form of my form? Who watches me here? Who ever anywhere will read these written words? Signs on a white field. Somewhere to someone in your flutiest voice. The good bishop of Cloyne took the veil of the temple out of his shovel hat: veil of space with coloured emblems hatched on its field. Hold hard. Coloured on a flat: yes, that's right. Flat I see, then think distance, near, far, flat I see, east, back. Ah, see now! Falls back suddenly frozen in stereoscope. Click does the trick. You find my words dark. Darkness is in our souls do you not think? Flutier. Our souls, shamewounded by our sins, cling to us yet more, a woman to her lover clinging, the more the more.
She trusts me, her hand gentle, the longlashed eyes. Now where the blue hell am I bringing her beyond the veil? Into the ineluctable modality of the ineluctable visuality. She, she, she. What she? The virgin at Hodges Figgis' window on Monday looking in for one of the alphabet books you were going to write. Keen glance you gave her. Wrist through the braided jesse of her sunshade. She lives in Leeson park, a lady of letters. Talk that to someone else, Stevie: a piekmeup. Bet she wears those curse of God stays suspenders and yellow stockings, darned with lumpy wool. Talk about apple dumpling, piuttosto. Where are your wits?
Touch me. Soft eyes. Soft soft soft hand. I am lonely here. O, touch me soon, now. What is that word known to all men? I am quiet here alone. Sad too. Touch, touch me.
He lay back at full stretch over the sharp rocks, cramming the scribbled note and pencil into a pocket, his hat tilted down on his eyes. That is Kevin Egan's movement I made, nodding for his nap. Hlo! Bonjour. Under its leaf he watched through peacock-twittering lashes the southing sun. I am caught in this burning scene. Pan's hour, the faunal noon. Among gumheavy seipentplants, milkoozing fruits, where on the tawny waters leaves lie wide. Pain is far.
And no more turn aside and brood. His gaze brooded on his broadtoed boots, a buck's castoffs, nebeneinander. He counted the creases of rucked leather wherein another's foot had nested warm. The foot that beat the ground in tripudium, foot I dislove. But you were delighted when Esther Osvalt's shoe went on you: girl I knew in Paris. Tiens, quel petit pied! Staunch friend, a brother soul: Wilde's love that dare not speak its name. He now will leave me. And the blame? As I am. All or not at all.
In long lassos from the Cock lake the water flowed full, covering greengoldenly lagoons of sand, rising, flowing. My ashplant will float away. I shall wait. No, they will pass on, passing chafing against the low rocks, swirling, passing. Better get this job over quick. Listen: a fourworded wavespeech: seesoo, hrss, rsseeiss coos. Vehement breath of waters amid seasnakes, rearing horses, rocks. In cups of rocks it slops: flop, slop, slap: bounded in barrels. And, spent, its speech ceases. It flows purling, widely flowing, floating foampool, flower unfurling.
Under the upswelling tide he saw the writhing weeds lift languidly and sway reluctant arms, hising up their petticoats, in whispering water swaying and upturning coy silver fronds. Day by day: night by night: lifted, flooded and let fall: Lord, they are weary: and, whispered to, they sigh. Saint Ambrose heard it, sigh of leaves and waves, waiting, awaiting the fulness of their times, diebus ac noctibus iniurias patiens ingemiscit. To no end gathered: vainly then released, forthflowing, wending back: loom of the moon. Weary too in sight of lovers, lascivious men, a naked woman shining in her court, she draws a toil of waters.
Five fathoms out there. Full fathoms five thy father lies. At one he said. High water at Dublin bar. Driving before it a loose drift of rubble, fan-shoals of fishes, silly shells. A corpse rising salt-white from the undertow, bobbing landward. There he is. Hook it quick. Pull. We have him. Easy now.
Bag of corpsegas sopping in foul brine. A quiver of minnows, fat of a spongy titbit, flash through the slits of his buttoned trouserfly. God becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes featherbed mountain. Dead breaths I living breathe, tread dead dust, devour a urinous offal from all dead.
##30 THE EGOIST March—April 1919
Hauled stark over the gunwale he breathes upward the stench of his green grave, his leprous nosehole snoring to the sun.
A seachange this. Seadeath, mildest of all death's known to man. Prix de Paris: beware of imitations. Just you give it a fair trial. We enjoyed ourselves immensely.
Come. Clouding over. No black clouds anywhere, are there? Thunderstorm. No. My cockle hat and staff and hismy sandal shoon. Where? To evening lands. Evening will find itself.
He took the hilt of his ashplant, lunging with it softly, dallying still. Yes, evening will find itself in me, without me. All days make their end. By the way next when is it Tuesday will be the longest day. Of all the glad new year, mother, the rum tum tiddledy turn. Lawn Tennyson, gentleman poet. Già. For the old hag with the yellow teeth. And Monsieur Drumont, gentleman journalist. Già. My teeth are very bad. Why, I wonder? Feel. That one is going to. Shells. Ought I go to a dentist, I wonder, with that money? That one. This. Toothless Kinch, the superman. Why is that, I wonder, or does it mean something perhaps?
My handkerchief. He threw it. I remember. Did I not take it up?
Behind. Perhaps there is someone.
He turned his face over a shoulder, rere regardant. Moving through the air high spars of a threemaster, her sails brailed up on the crosstrees, homing, silently moving, a silent ship.—
(To be continued) </ab></div>
<div type="articles">
<ab>THREE GEORGIAN NOVELISTS
III
THE literary career of Mr. Gilbert Cannan, the bad boy of the Georgian novelists, has so far been much more exciting than that of either Mr. Walpole or Mr. Mackenzie, though perhaps less successful commercially. It has in many ways been an adventurous career, full of experiment and variety of endeavour— a tentative, groping, dissatisfied kind of career. Throughout it Mr. Cannan's worst enemy has been his own cleverness. In his life as an artist this cleverness has been his greatest danger; it has constantly tripped him up, interposed itself between him and his inspiration, and at times lured him into an arid display of mental gymnastics. . . .
Where Messrs. Mackenzie and Walpole have applied themselves assiduously to the business of producing fiction, Mr. Cannan has had a shot at almost everything. He has taken up the art of satire, written a treatise on it, and produced a brilliant book called Windmills which will be more heard of two years hence than it is to-day. Then, in a moment of aberration, he has published a volume of unreadable love poems, now, happily, all sunk beneath the wave. He has written, with much gusto, an appreciation of Samuel Butler. Again, in another evil moment— bewitched, no doubt, by one of those "art" coteries which exist in London in such profusion—he has produced an "artistic" peasant play called Miles Dixon. This is a deadly piece of work, written in that English equivalent of Kiltartan which Mr. Masefield first popularized in Nan, and reeking with the fumes of Café Royal consommations masquerading as fresh air. But, as if to atone for it. Mr. Cannan has also given us Inquest on Pierrot and Everybody's Husband. Then, in a very different frame of mind, Mr. Cannan has made an admirable translation of Romain Rolland's Jean Christophe: a Herculean labour of love for which he ought certainly to be awarded a Civil List pension. And now, to crown everything, he is engaged in slapping his library public in the face with a vast, sloppy, Don Juanesque "epic in ten cantos" called Noel.
It will be seen from all this that Mr. Cannan touches life at many points and has not allowed himself to remain in any intellectual rut. He has theories on the way things ought to be done, and on the kind of plays which ought to be written; he is a politician, a propagandist, has occasionally been attracted by "movements" and very often seduced by ideas. And these things, when he has finally distilled from them what he needs for his art, will eventually put him among those novelists whose interest is likely to last. His ideas are frequently "subversive," and few of them would be accepted by "the dear Dean," who thinks so highly of Mr. Mackenzie and Mr. Walpole.
But it is just Mr. Cannan's susceptibility to ideas, his intellectual restlessness, his dissatisfaction (perhaps he is at times suspicious and dissatisfied even with his own cleverness), which combine to make him one of the most interesting and hopeful literary figures of to-day. All his experiments indicate that he is groping to find the heart of things, to discover what is real in human life, to catch a glimpse of the back of beyond. It is just his tendency to burrow beneath the surface which, for the time being, impairs Mr. Cannan's popularity as a novelist. If, like Mr. Mackenzie and in a less degree Mr. Walpole, he were content to be merely clever, his sales might go up in proportion as his reputation suffered. But, fortunately for himself, he is less complacent about the art of writing than his rivals. He is always on the watch to try to put off cleverness, and where his inspiration comes freshly from the heart, as in Round the Corner and, in a less degree, in Old Mole and in Mendel, he largely (though not completely) succeeds in doing so. These three books, and passages in his other novels, come through on their sincerity and are made fragrant by flashes of human sympathy, imagination, and fancy which that sincerity has succeeded in liberating. Where such books as Three Pretty Men and the Stucco House fail is in their general conception. They seem to have been planned purely by the outer brain. The grandiose project once formed, by sheer force of character the author has proceeded to carry it out. The result is a vast and dreary edifice, with only a very few habitable rooms in it—a drab, unlovely "folly."
Mr. Cannan is a writer who has yet to find himself, has yet to discover what it is that he can do best and —concentrating on that thing—to produce a work of art which shall fulfil all the promise which his various literary experiments have given so abundantly. The discovery once made, if he only has the strength of character to eschew versatility, he may find himself linked no longer with mere entertainers like Messrs. Walpole and Mackenzie, but recognized with Mr, D. H. Lawrence as one of the great novelists of the England of to-morrow. For Mr. Cannan is that now rare bird, an Englishman conscious of his nationality. His voice is an English voice, and he has it in him to render articulate much that is most truly and most deeply English in current thought.
Douglas Goldring
TOWARDS A PEACE THEATRE
By Huntly Carter
III. A NEW DEFINITION OF DRAMA AND ITS TECHNIQUE
I SAID in my last article that Drama is the seed of the new structure which I have called a Theatre of Peace. It needs only to determine the content of this seed to know what the outcome, that is, the theatre, will be. Logically, it can only be the visible unity of which the cause resides in the seed; just as the oak-tree is the visible unity of the antecedent unity which resides in the acorn. Hence,
##March—April 1919 THE EGOIST 31
if the cause be a creative one, the unified effect must be creative also; otherwise it is a counterfeit.
What is Drama? Of what actively is it an activity? Do we use the word in a proper or improper sense? I am inclined to think in the latter only. I have very good reason for thinking so. Since I last wrote in these columns a book has come to me from the publishing house of Stewart and Kidd, Cincinnati, U.S.A. It is a very good book, and I am not going to quarrel with the publisher's attempt to glorify it by calling it "Of Paramount Importance." In any case, an anthology of European Theories of the Drama is much wanted just now. Mr. Barrett H. Clark gives us the big theorists, from Professor Aristotle to Mr. Bernard Shaw, and allows them to have their say, and the lesser and minor ones, and lumps them together as persons who have advanced views, but have not reached the advanced stage of airing their eloquence and the fatness of their ideas. I do not propose in this place to examine Mr. Barrett's excellent book. It may come up for trial later. Meanwhile, for the encouragement of others I may say that all they need do is buy it. If they study it also I feel they will find that I am correct in saying that men use the word Drama in an improper sense. Mr. Barrett's title leads one to believe that his theoretical contributors are defining "the drama" when, as a matter of fact, they are defining all sorts of things called variously Art, Drama, Poetry, Tragedy, Comedy, Farce, and Lord knows what else. Here is a source of endless confusion between the thing itself and its varied forms.
The mass of confusion thus presented resembles that produced by some of our celebrated scribblers, who look upon literature as a profession but do their utmost to treat it as a trade. They assure us that from their youth up they have been taught to regard precision of thought and of expression as the quality they alone were born to attain, while their writings deny this by revealing a rooted horror of the use of words to mean truth. The fact of the matter is that ever since words began to replace action as the most valued asset of mankind, men have gradually lost perception of the feelings and experiences that called them into existence. So, instead of continuing to respond to their inner feelings and inventing peculiar terms to suit the real character of the facts of each great emotional period of history, such, for instance, as those of the immense economic wave now sweeping over the earth, men have fallen into the wicked habit of perverting established terms from their true significations for the purpose of expressing the facts of current experience. So, when men refer to Art, Drama, Poetry, and Religion, they do not refer to the permanent truth in them. They refer to a sense that has been attached to them by current superstition, ignorance, or folly. In view of the mania for persuading words to tell lies it is no wonder that we find our own pernicious period of science (now happily passing for ever one sincerely trusts) full of the grounding of theories of Art, Drama, Poetry, and Religion on the superstitious belief in science as a sort of super-god. Look how Art and Art-expression have hopelessly been mixed by muddled minds. And it is no wonder that it is almost a superhuman task trying to convince the motley army of mis-handlers that each of these terms encloses a spiritual activity which demands to be released before its eternal constructive law or principle can be set in action. It would be easier to convince them that you can make a motor go before you stir up the petroleum.
Regarding the definition of Drama it might be objected that men are largely the victims of a convention, and that when everything is said, Aristotle is the author of that convention. I quite agree. If the nature of the convention had been different, if the term Drama had been given a spiritual instead of a
material import, and this import had been solemnly and strictly asserted and taught by each succeeding generation of theatricians (as men of the theatre might be called), there would be no room for tears and jeers. Drama hears within itself a power of spiritual conversion which is the sign that enables us to recognize it. The drama is a form assumed by Drama for the purpose of asserting its power of spiritual conversion. Suppose this definition had become a convention, what would it have yielded? Precisely the same result as Civilization will yield when the word is given a spiritual in place of a material import. Drama would then set men in the infinitude of space and time, and the drama would reveal them unfolding beneath the touch of Bible verity, and in such a way as to initiate all into the truth of the conversion. Besides this, it would place Comedy on its right as its chief unfolder, and kick Tragedy out as a very debased form of comedy indeed. I dare say this will shock the reason of the material-minded. But I will not apologize, for there are more shocks coming with the practical proposals which art due next.
THE ITALIAN IDEA
A NEWSPAPER, published monthly, for the diffusion of the Italian idea abroad has just made its appearance in Florence, La vraie Italie, organe de liaison intellectuelle entre l'Italie et les autres Pays (8 Via Ricasoli, Florence; 6 fr. per annum), declaring itself "tout à fait (absolument) indépendante," and that it receives encouragement neither from the Italian nor from any other government or official source, is written in French for the given reason that this language will convey the purpose of the paper most readily, Italian being little familiar, especially in France, where it has been completely neglected, disdained even, since the seventeenth century, up to which time it was every one's natural accomplishment. The editor, Mr. Papini, asks to be excused for the defective usage of the French idiom in view of his intentions. He has things to say, practical things, which it is urgent should be said and understood quickly. He does not aim at "high literature" but to communicate facts, thoughts, information. "We reserve the mastery of style and the purity of language to our Italian works," he says, adding: "Our friends will, perhaps, be shocked by our mistakes, but never so much as we are shocked by the erroneous ideas their country entertains about ours. They may teach us the proper use of the French language, but we can furnish them with good hints about the Italian soul."
The contents of the first number: Declarations (exhilarating); Notre mauvais français (bravo); Les Nations Sœurs (it was time); Wilson et l'Italie (sense); Littérature Wilsonienne; Baudelaire en Italie; Apollinaire Italianisant; Le Problème Yougo-Slave et l'Italie; De la Dalmatie et du Tact; Les Ploutocrates Italiens; M. Giovanni Amendola; Le Nouveau Cabinet; Giovanni Verga;
Toute la Guerre (about an Italian anthology of war literature);
Les Italiens ont gouverné la France (historical);
Les Jeunes Revues;
Le "Studio Italiano de Moscou";
Le Trittico de M. Puccini;
Vilfredo Pareto.
If it is propaganda it is wonderfully clever; if it is not, then it makes the best propaganda I have come across yet. Clear-thinking, plucky action. And, as honesty and competence are never one-sided, and intelligence is not intelligence if it is not so all-round, the paper is as well compiled and printed as it is edited; the form is equal to the spirit thereof. It is as much one's duty to refer to it as it is one's duty to have read Dante.
M. C.
##32 THE EGOIST March-April 1919</ab></div>
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<ab>"THE ANGLO-FRENCH REVIEW"
We have been asked to insert the following notice:
All those who have at heart the development, in all its branches, of the intellectual and economic entente between England and France will be interested to learn that a new organ of opinion, entitled The Anglo-French Review, dealing with literature, economics, politics, science, and art, made its debut on February 21, under the editorship of M. Henry D. Davray and Mr. J. Lewis May. Though founded in the belief that a complete and permanent intellectual alliance between the two countries is the best guarantee for the future peace and happiness of the world, The Anglo-French Review will be conducted in no narrow partisan or propagandist spirit, as is evidenced by the fact that the list of its contributors includes writers so diverse in opinion and intellectual outlook as M. Anatole France and Mr. Edmund Gosse, Mr. A. J. Balfour and Mr. W. A. Appleton, M. Léon Bourgeois and Sir A. Chiozza Money, M. Albert Thomas and Viscount Grey. Contributions will be in English or in French, according to the nationality of the writer.
"QUIA PAUPER AMAVI"
The Egoist has pleasure in adding to its list a new volume of poems by Mr. Ezra Pound, entitled Quia Pauper Amavi.* This will be the most important and best-formed book by Mr. Pound since Personne. It is made up of four groups of poems: his Provençal type, his modern type, three cantos of a long poem, and "Homage to Sextus Propertius." None of these poems has appeared in a book with the exception of the three cantos, which are found in the American Lustra. The "Homage to Sextus Propertius" does for Augustan Rome what "Cathay" did for China of Bihaku's time, and is probably a more important contribution to European civilization.
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THE ADELPHI GALLERY
The Adelphi Gallery opened at 9 Duke Street, Adelphi, W.C.2, on March 8 with an Exhibition of Woodcuts by Edward Wadsworth.
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