It must be admitted that this habit of Mr. Pound has its good as well as its somewhat absurd side; there is only a step from the ridiculous to the sublime. It must also be affirmed, however it may reflect upon our English critics, that it is precisely the good side of Mr. Pound’s technique which they usually condemn. For the good side consists of this, that all the poets who can claim to belong to the school of Mr. Pound must display in addition to the above-mentioned defects, the certain and positive merits of study of their art and deliberate craftsmanship. No poet dare claim to be a pupil of Mr. Pound who cannot prove that he has been to school to poetry, and submitted himself to a craft-apprenticeship; and no poet will long command Mr. Pound’s approval who is not always learning and experimenting. Now this, which I call the good side of Mr. Pound’s doctrine, is disliked in England, where it has for years been the habit of critics to pretend that poetry grows on bushes or in parsley-beds. That poetry should be the practice of “a learned, self-conscious craft,” to be carried on by a “guild of adepts,” appears to Mr. Archer, for example, to be a heresy of the first order. How much of the best poetry, he exclaims, has been written with “little technical study behind it”; and how little necessary, therefore, any previous learning is. To the dogs with Mr. Pound’s doctrine! Let the motto over the gates of the Temple of Poetry be: “No previous experience required.” It will be seen, of course, how the confusion in Mr. Archer’s mind has arisen. Because it is a fact that the “best” poetry looks effortless, he has fallen into the spectator’s error of concluding that it is effortless. And because, again, a considerable part of the work of the “learned, self-conscious craftsmen” is pedantic and artificial, he has been confirmed in his error. The truth of the matter, however, is with Mr. Pound. Dangerous as it may be to require that a poet shall be learned in his profession, it is much more dangerous to deprecate his learning. By a happy fluke, it may be, a perfect poem may occasionally be written “without previous study”; from too much previous study there may also occasionally result only verse smelling of the lamp; but in the long run, and for the cultivation of poetry as an art, there is no doubt that the most fruitful way is the way of the craftsman and the adept.
Mr. Ezra Pound on Religion.—Mr. Pound has been called over the coals for his impolite dismissal of Mr. G. K. Chesterton as a danger to English literature. But, good gracious, Mr. G. K. Chesterton’s reputation is not so frail that it cannot take care of itself against a spirited idiosyncrasy. Mr. Pound has expressed his honest opinion; but what is discussion for but to elicit honest opinions, and then to extract the truth from them? There is undoubtedly a fragment of truth in Mr. Pound’s view of Mr. G. K. Chesterton’s influence, and it is this: that Mr. Chesterton is a most dangerous man to imitate. His imitators become apes. But that is not to say that Mr. Chesterton is not himself a great writer. Shakespeare is likewise a dangerous man to imitate; and we should only be repeating good criticism if we affirmed that the influence of Shakespeare upon English style has been on the whole bad. But this is not to detract from the greatness of Shakespeare. Every writer of a unique style is liable to ruin his imitators; and, from this point of view, the wise thing to be done is to classify good writers as writers to be imitated and writers never to be imitated. Among the former are the writers whom personally I prefer; for I love best the men of the eighteenth century, who aimed at writing as nearly as possible like the world, and through whom the common genius of the English language spoke. But there is pleasure and profit also in the highly individualised styles of the latter sort of writers, beginning, let us say, with Euphues, and represented to-day by Mr. G. K. Chesterton. Mr. Pound may have no fancy for the unique and personally conducted style of Mr. Chesterton, but it is a matter entirely of taste and not of judgment. Should he announce that he cannot tolerate Swift or Burke or Sterne, writers of pure English, then, indeed, I should join in deploring his judgment. As it is, I listen to his remarks on Mr. Chesterton as I should hear his opinions of crab-soup.
Coming to his views upon religion and upon Christianity, I find myself not so much hostile to Mr. Pound as bewildered by him; and yet not bewildered to the degree of much curiosity. Certain critical views of religion are stimulating. Nietzsche’s, for example, or Huxley’s, or W. K. Clifford’s, or even Frazer’s. You feel they come from minds serious enough to take religion seriously, and that they are expressive rather of impatience with the superficiality of current religion than of hostility to religion itself. Nietzsche and the rest, in fact, were not critical of religion and of Christianity because they were themselves indifferent to religion, but because they were too intensely concerned with the religious problem to accept the popular solutions. Mr. Pound, on the other hand, does not appear to me to be a serious thinker on the subject. He dismisses the current popular solutions not only as if they were, as they mostly are, superficial and absurd, but as if the problems of conscience, the soul, sin, and of salvation, to which these solutions are trial replies, were non-existent or trivial. It is his indifference to the reality of the problems, and not his criticism of the popular solutions, that keeps my mind at a distance from Mr. Pound’s when he is writing on religion. He does not so much as even irritate me, he simply leaves me as indifferent to his opinions as he is himself.
Mr. Pound, Caricaturist.—Mr. Ezra Pound comes in for it again—as he always does. His idiosyncrasies are the enemies of his personality, and they will always, unless he can amend them, militate against both his work and his success. Mr. Pound appears to love to give his readers the impression that he is no end of a fire-eater, and that he is a charlatan of the first-water, setting up to lecture better men on the virtues he himself has never cultivated. It is an absolutely incorrect picture, an exceedingly bad self-portrait, a malicious caricature of himself. A psycho-analyst would attribute it all to “compensation,” to an attempt on the part of Mr. Pound to disguise his qualities as defects. In brief, Mr. Pound has not the courage of his virtues. “No one,” says Mr. Hartley in the Little Review, “admires Ezra Pound more than I do ... but it is his celestial sneer I admire.” A sneer, celestial or mundane, is, however, the last gesture of which Mr. Pound is capable. If anything, he is too benignant, too enthusiastic, too anxious to find excuse for admiration.
The Admirable Victorians.—I am prepared to apologise if I have ever used “Victorian” in a derogatory sense. But I know I have not. I have too deep a respect for the Victorian character ever to make light of it, and especially for my own generation, that can afford to laugh at so little. Mr. Strachey’s “brilliant” essays, therefore, leave me laughing at him rather than with him. One is impelled to take him personally, and to turn the tables upon Mr. Strachey with the argumentum ad hominem. How do you compare with the people you write about? For it is the peculiarity of the Victorians—our grandfathers and great-grandfathers—that whatever we may feel about them in our current opinions, someone has only to sneer at them to provoke us to their defence; and what better defence can they ask than to be compared, man for man, with their critics? As a set-off to the “brilliant” essays of Mr. Strachey—how easy it is to be brilliant nowadays! I have recently read, on the loan of his great-grandson, the privately printed personal memoir of Wm. Mattingly Soundy, who died in 1862, at the full age of 96. For 24 years he was a member of his local Congregational church, and for 46 years he was deacon. During nearly the whole of that time he never missed a meeting, Sunday or week-day, and was never known to be late, though he lived two miles from the church. It is the round of a machine, you may say, and there is no wonder that the age was mechanical. But I think of the passionate mainspring that kept a “machine” going for so long without a psychological breakdown. What an intensity it must have had! What a character! If to love it is impossible, it is impossible not to admire it; and since we truly live by admiration, hope and love, it is something for the Victorians that they can still fill us with admiration. My own generation (now past as a force) has provided the soul of the world with nothing so fine.
French Clarté.—M. Vannier’s La Clarté Française does not throw much light upon the mysteries of French lucidity. He accepts as self-evident Rivarol’s axiom that “what is not clear is not French”—surely worthy to be the national device of France; and he analyses with admirable humour a considerable number of examples of “clarté,” and the want of it. But the mystery of lucidity remains a mystery still. Flaubert’s practice of reading his compositions aloud puts us on the most promising scent, for it is certain that the French “clarté” is eminently readable aloud and in company. A great deal of our own literature is meant for the eye and not for the ear, for the study and not for the salon, with the consequence that at its best it is the grand style simple, but at its worst shocking. Written for the ear, and meant to be read in company, French literature is never grand, but neither is it ever silly. Its range is society, while ours is solitude.
When Shall We Translate?—There is nothing particularly “masterly” from the modern English point of view in Hobbes’s translation of Pericles’s Funeral Oration. His period of English prose appears to have been ill-adapted for the translation of the Greek idiom of the time of Pericles. To the usual cautions against translations in general, we ought to add the caution against translations made in dissimilar epochs. It is not at any time in the history of a language that a translation from a foreign language can safely be undertaken. In all probability, indeed, the proper period for translation is no longer in point of time than the period within which the original itself was written. If the Periclean Age lasted, let us say, fifty years, it is within a period in English history of the same length that an adequate translation can be made. Once let that period go by, and a perfect translation will be for ever impossible. And equally the result will be a failure, if the translation is attempted before its time has come. I do not think that the Hobbesian period of English was in key with the period of Periclean Greek; nor, again, do I think that our period for perfect translation has yet come. A “masterpiece” of translation of Pericles’s Oration is still, in my opinion, to be done. But I am confident that we are approaching the proper period, and in proof of this I would remark on the superiority of Jowett’s translation over that of Hobbes. Jowett, as a writer of original English, nobody, I think, would compare with Hobbes of Malmesbury. Hobbes was a great pioneer, a creator of language; Jowett was only a good writer. Nevertheless, the idiom in which Jowett wrote, was more nearly perfect (that is, fully developed) English than the idiom in which Hobbes wrote. And since, in point of development, the correspondence between Periclean Greek and Jowett’s English is closer than the correspondence between Periclean Greek and Hobbes’s English, Jowett’s translation is nearer the original than Hobbes’s.
It would be a pleasant exercise in style to criticise Jowett’s translation, and a still more profitable exercise to amend it. To a mere student of comparative values in Periclean Greek and idiomatic English, some of the errors in Jowett’s translation are obvious. Such a student needs not to refer with the scholar’s precision to the original Greek to be able, with the approval of all men of taste, to pronounce that such and such a phrase or word is most certainly not what may be called Periclean English. It stands to the totality of reason that it is not so. We may be certain, for instance, that Pericles, were he delivering his Oration in English, with all the taste and training he possessed as a Greek of his age, would never have employed such phrases as these: “commended the law-giver,” “a worthy thing,” “burial to the dead,” “reputation ... imperilled on ... the eloquence,” “who knows the facts,” “suspect exaggeration.” Pericles, we cannot but suppose both from the man and his age, spoke with studied simplicity, that is to say, with perfect naturalness. The words and phrases he used were in all probability the most ordinary to the ear of the Athenian, and well within the limits of serious conversation. But such phrases as I have mentioned are not of the same English character; they are written, not spoken phrases, and approximate more to a leading commemorative article in The Times than to a speech we should all regard as excellent. It would be interesting to have Lord Rosebery’s version of Pericles’ speech, or even Mr. Asquith’s. Both, it is probable, would be nearer the original than Jowett’s, though still some distance off perfection. In another fifty years perfection will be reached.
Nature in Mind.—The Quest contains an article by Mr. G. R. S. Mead, in which he suggests—and, perhaps, rather more than suggests—an affinity, if not an identity, between the “laws” of nature and the “laws” of mind. Ever since I read the following sentence in Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria: “The highest perfection of natural philosophy would consist in the perfect spiritualisation of all the laws of nature into laws of intuition and intellect,” it has been at the back of my mind as an aim to keep before philosophy. Whether or not there is a drummer in every age with whom the active thinkers keep in step, even without being aware of the fact, I can only say that more and more evidence of this tendency of thought is coming to light. Boutroux’s Contingency of the Laws of Nature may be said to have most explicitly attempted the sublimation—or, dare we say, the humanisation?—of the natural laws; but Boutroux is only one of many philosophers working in the same direction. Other areas of study than that of “pure” philosophy seem to have yielded, or to be yielding, the same result. Mr. Mead quotes, for instance, some recent studies of Animism to show that Animism, which, together with Anthropomorphism, we used to dismiss as merely a primitive mode of thought, may, after all, prove to contain a truth, the truth, namely, that Nature is living and intelligent, and, on that account, not so far from human nature as we had come to imagine. “The more we penetrate Matter,” says Mr. Mead, “the more akin to Mind we find it to be.” The world is a creation of mind; and the more either of the world or of mind we understand the more we understand of both. It is a thrilling idea, the conception of the world of nature as being the externalisation of an intelligence akin to our own. At the same time, it is, like all thrilling ideas, associated with considerable danger. The “superstitions” connected with it are perhaps best left under the shadow that has been cast upon them.