Readers and Writers (1917-1921)

by A. R. Orage

The Fate of Sculpture.—The art-critic of The Times having remarked that “the public hardly looks at the sculpture in the Academy, or outside it,” Mr. John Tweed, an eminent sculptor himself, has now uttered a public lamentation in agreement with him. Sculpture to-day, he says, is an art without an audience; and he quotes a Belgian artist who told him what heroes our contemporary sculptors in this country must be to continue their work in the face of a unanimous neglect. It is not certain, however, that the sculptors of to-day do not thoroughly well deserve the fate to which they now find themselves condemned. In the economy of the arts, or, if this phrase be preferred, in the strategy of æsthetics, nothing is more necessary from time to time in each of the arts than an iconoclast—by which I indicate not a destroyer simply, but a creator of new forms. Such a pioneer is of necessity a little rude to his immediate predecessors and to such of his contemporaries as are sheep. But in the end, nevertheless, if they will only accept and recognise him, he will revive their art for them. But in the case of sculpture the two such iconoclasts as have recently appeared—Mr. Epstein and the late Gaudier-Brzeska—were instantly set upon, not by the public, but by their contemporaries, and walled within a neglect far more complete than the neglect sculpture in general has received. Just when it appeared that they might be about to reawaken public interest in carven forms, the rest of the sculptors hurried to silence them, with the consequence that at this moment there is literally nobody engaged in sculpture in whom the intelligent public takes the smallest interest. As sculptors have treated sculpture, so the public now treats sculptors. It is a pretty piece of karma.

The Too Clever.—Neglect means nothing very much; success is a matter of time for everything that is really classic. On the other hand, deliberately to incur neglect by writing for the few involves the further risk of more and more deserving it. Whoever makes a boast of writing for a coterie sooner or later finds himself writing for a coterie of a coterie, and at last for himself alone. It cannot be otherwise. As the progress of the classic is from the one to the many, the progress of the romantic is from the many to the one; and the more sincerely the latter is a romantic, the sooner he arrives at his journey’s end. The involution of aim thus brought about is obvious already in the succession of works of the chief writers of the Little Review. They grow cleverer and cleverer, and, at the same time, more and more unintelligible. I am staggered by the cleverness of such a writer as Mr. Wyndham Lewis, and a little more so at the cleverness of Mr. James Joyce. But in the case of both of them I find myself growing more and more mystified, bewildered, and repelled. Is it, I ask, that they do not write for readers like me? Then their circle must be contracting, for I am one of many who used to read them with pleasure. And who are they gaining while losing us? Are their new readers more intensive if fewer, and better worth while for their quality than we were for our numbers? But I decline to allow the favourable answers. The fact is that the writers of the Little Review are getting too clever even for coterie, and will soon be read only by each other, or themselves.

A characteristic example is to be found in the opening chapter of Mr. James Joyce’s new novel, Ulysses. This is how it begins:—

Stately, plump Buck Milligan came from the stairway, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing-gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned....

Now it is clear that such a passage has not been written without a great deal of thought, and if thought were art, it might be called an artistic passage. But thought is not only not art, but the aim of art is to conceal thought. In its perfection art is indistinguishable from nature. The conspicuous thoughtfulness of the passage I have quoted is, therefore, an objection to it; and the more so since it provokes an inspection it is unable to sustain. Challenged to “think” about what the writer is saying, the reader at once discovers that the passage will not bear thinking about. He asks, for instance, whence Buck Milligan came from the staircase; how he managed to balance a crossed mirror and razor on a bowl’s edge—and, particularly, while bearing them aloft; and what mild air it was that sustained the tails of a man’s dressing-gown. To these questions deliberately provoked by the ostentatious care of the writer there is either no answer or none forthcoming without more thought than the detail is worth. The passage, in short, suffers from being aimed at a diminishing coterie; and it succeeds in satisfying, I imagine, only the writer of it who is alone in all its secrets. Mr. James Joyce had once the makings of a great writer—not a popular writer, but a classic writer. To become what he was he needed to be opened out, to be simplified, to conceal his cleverness, to write more and more for the world. But first in the Egoist and now in the Little Review he has been directed to cultivate his faults, his limitations, his swaddling clothes of genius, with the result that he is in imminent danger of brilliant provincialism.

Homage to Propertius.—Mr. Ezra Pound’s Homage to Propertius has drawn an American Professor of Latin into the pages of the American magazine Poetry. Professor Hales is indignant at the attempt of Mr. Pound to make Propertius intelligible as well as merely accessible to the modern English reader, and in the name of Scholarship, he begs Mr. Pound to “lay aside the mask of erudition” and to confess himself nothing better than a poet. With some of Professor Hales’s literal criticisms it is impossible not to agree. Speaking in the name of the schools, he is frequently correct. But in the name of the humanities of life, of art, of literature, what in the world does it matter that Mr. Pound has spelled Punic with a capital when he meant a small letter, or that he has forgotten the existence of the Marcian aqueduct? Mr. Pound did not set out with the intention of making a literal translation of Propertius. He set out with the intention of creating in English verse a verse reincarnation, as it were, of Propertius, a “homage” to Propertius that should take the form of rendering him a contemporary of our own. And, secondly, all criticism based on the text of Propertius is invalid unless it is accompanied by a perception of the psychological quality of Propertius as he lived. But Professor Hales, it is clear, has no sense for this higher kind of criticism, for he complains that there is “no hint” in Propertius’s text of “certain decadent meanings” which Mr. Pound attributes to him. Is there not, indeed? Accepting decadence in its modern American meaning, Propertius can only be said to be full of it. No literary critic, accustomed to reading through and between an author’s lines, whether they be Latin, Greek, or English, can doubt the evidence of his trained senses that the mind behind the text of Propertius was a mind which the Latin Professor of the Chicago University would call decadent, if only it expressed itself in English. The facts that Propertius was a poet contemporary with Ovid, that he wrote of the life of the luxurious Roman Empire, as one who habitually lived it, that he wrote of love and of his own adventures, are quite sufficient to prove that he was a child of his age; and if his age was, as it undoubtedly was, decadent, in a professorial sense, Propertius, we may be sure, shared its decadence. I am not saying, it will be observed, nor, I think, would Mr. Pound say, that to have shared in decadence and to be sympathetic to it are the same thing as to be decadent in oneself. What, in fact, distinguishes Propertius is his æsthetic reaction against decadence, against the very decadence in which he had been brought up, and with which he had sympathised. But this is not to admit that “no hint of certain decadent meanings” is to be found in him. On the contrary, he could not very well have become the æsthetic reaction against decadence without importing into his verse more than a hint of certain decadent meanings. In effect, Propertius is the compendium of the Roman Empire at its turning point in the best minds. Long before history with its slow sequence of events proved to the gross senses of mankind that Empire was a moral and æsthetic blunder, Propertius discovered the fact for himself and recorded his judgment in the æsthetic form of his exquisite verse. But he must have passed through decadence in order to have arrived at his final judgment; and, indeed, as I have said, his verse bears witness of it. Professor Hales has been misled by Propertius’s reflections, by his habit of sublimating his experiences, by his criticism of decadence. But that reflection was only an accompaniment, or, rather, sequel of Propertius’s mode of life; it did not, any more than such reflection does to-day, make impossible or even improbable a mode of life in violent contrast with the reflection made upon it.

Mr. Pound and Mr. Wyndham Lewis in Public.—Mr. Ezra Pound has for some months been the “foreign” or exile editor of the Little Review; and I gather from the nature of the contributions that he has practically commandeered most of the space. A series of letters and some stories by Mr. Wyndham Lewis; letters, stories and verse, by Mr. Pound; ditto, ditto, ditto, by other—shall I say London?—writers—are evidence that Mr. Pound’s office is no sinecure. He delivers the goods. The aim of the Little Review, as defined without the least attempt at camouflage by the editress (that is to say, the real American director of the venture), is to publish articles, stories, verses, and drawings of pure art—whatever that may be. It is not demanded of them that they shall be true—or false; that they shall have a meaning—single or double; that they shall be concerned with life—or fancy. Nothing, in fact, is asked of them but that they shall be art, just art. Less explicitly, but to the same effect, both Mr. Pound and Mr. Wyndham Lewis subscribe to the same formula. They, too, are after art, nothing but art. But in other respects they define themselves more clearly. From Mr. Wyndham Lewis, for instance, I gather that the aim of the Little Review artists is to differentiate themselves from the mob. Art would seem to consist, indeed, in this differentiation or self-separation. Whatever puts a gulf between yourself and the herd, and thus “distinguishes” you, is and must be art, because of this very effect. And Mr. Pound carries on the doctrine a stage by insisting that the only thing that matters about the mob is to deliver individuals from it. Art, in short, is the discovery, maintenance, and culture of individuals.

We have all heard of this doctrine; and there is no doubt that it is very seductive. But to whom? It has been remarked before that the appeal of Nietzsche has often been to the last persons in the world you would have thought capable of responding to him; or, let us say, to the last persons that ought to respond to him—weak-willed, moral imbeciles, with not enough intelligence to be even efficient slaves. These, as Nietzsche discovered, were only too often the sort of person that was attracted by his muscular doctrine of the Will to Power. It is the case likewise with the doctrine of individuality. Among its disciples there are, of course, the few who understand it; but the majority of them are precisely the persons who prove by their devotion their personal need of it. Individuality is for these as much a cult as health is a cult among the sick; and it is to be observed that they also have to take a good deal of care of themselves. They must never associate with the mob, they must be careful what they eat in the way of æsthetics; they must pick and choose among people, places and things with all the delicacy of an eggshell among potsherds. Above all, they must keep their art pure. Neither Mr. Wyndham Lewis nor Mr. Ezra Pound belongs to this class of æsthetic valetudinarians. Both are robust persons with excellent digestions, and with a great deal of substantial common sense. Nevertheless, both of them, to my mind, pose as invalids, and simulate all the whimperings and fastidiousness of the malades imaginaires. Read Mr. Lewis’s letters, for example, in the issues of the Little Review here under notice. The writer is obviously a very clever man, with a good experience and judgment of life, and possessed of a powerful style. But he has chosen to exhibit himself as a clever gymnast of words, with innumerable finnicking fancies against this or that lest he should be confused with the “mob.” And Mr. Pound is in much the same state. What is the need of it in their case, I ask? Unlike most of the other writers, neither Mr. Lewis nor Mr. Pound has any need to “cultivate” an individuality, or to surround it with walls and moats of poses. Neither has any need whatever to appear clever in order to be clever. On the contrary, both of them have need to do exactly the reverse—namely, to cut their too exuberant individuality down to the quick, and to reveal their cleverness by concealing it. Simplicity, as Oscar Wilde said—he, of course, only said it, he never really thought it—is the last refuge of complexity. And I put it to Mr. Lewis and Mr. Pound that with just a little more individuality, and with just a little more cleverness, their ambition will be to be indistinguishable from the mob, either by their individuality or their cleverness. They will not succeed in it. Individuality and cleverness, like murder, will out. The aim, however, of the wise possessor of either, is to conceal it in subtler and subtler forms of common sense and simplicity.

Among the clever poses of this type of “stage player of the spirit,” as Nietzsche called them, is the pose of the enfant terrible. They are mightily concerned to shock the bourgeoisie, and are never so happy as when they have said something naughty, and actually got it into print. Now it is, of course, very stupid for the bourgeoisie to be shocked. The bourgeoisie would be wiser to yawn. But it argues a similar kind of stupidity—anti-stupidity—to wish to shock them. But we do not wish to shock them, they say! We are indifferent to the existence of the bourgeoisie! Our aim is simply to write freely as artists, and to be at liberty to publish our work for such as can understand it. Publishing, however, is a public act; and I agree with the bourgeoisie that the art of an intimate circle or group is not of necessity a public art. Between private and public morality, personal and public policy, individual and communal art, there is all the difference of two differing scales of value. Queen Victoria did not wish to be addressed by Mr. Gladstone as if she were a public meeting. A public meeting does not like to be addressed as if it were a party of personal friends. The introduction of personal considerations into public policy is felt to be an intrusion; and to treat your friends as if you were legislating on their behalf is an impertinence. From all this it follows that to thrust all private art into the public eye is to mix the two worlds. Only that part of private art that is in good public taste ought to be exhibited in public; the rest is for private, personal, individual consumption, and ought to be left unpublished, or circulated only privately. Let the artist write what pleases him; let him circulate it among his friends; the only criterion here is personal taste. But immediately he proposes to publish his work, he should ask himself, the question: Is this in good public taste?

Mr. Ezra Pound as Metricist.—Under the title of Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry, a whole book—really, however, only an essay—has been devoted to the work of this literary enigma. For this honour, if honour it be, Mr. Pound is indebted more to what he has preached than to what he has practised; for on his actual achievement, considerable though it is, not even in America could anybody have been found to write a book. Mr. Pound will not deny that he is an American in this respect, if in none other, that he always likes to hitch his wagon to a star. He has always a ton of precept for a pound of example. And in America, more than in any other country save, perhaps, Germany, it appears to be required of a man that there shall be “significant” intention, aim, theory—anything you like expressive of direction—in everything he does. There does not appear to me to be anything very original in the creation of poetic images, or even in the employment of irregular metric; neither of them can be said to constitute a new departure in poetic technique. Yet Mr. Pound has elevated each of them to be the star of a cult, with the consequence that we now have professed “schools” of poetry, calling themselves Imagist or Verslibrist. These are examples of what I mean in saying that Mr. Pound loves to hitch his wagon to a star.