CONCLUSION
So far our sympathy with modernist poetry has been contemporary
sympathy. We have been writing as it were from the middle of the
modernist movement in order to justify it if possible against criticism
which was not proper to it, which belonged to the preceding stage in
poetry-making and which should have passed as the stage passed. It is
now possible to reach a position where the modernist movement itself
can be looked at with historical (as opposed to contemporary) sympathy
as a stage in poetry that is to pass in turn, or may have already
passed, leaving behind only such work as did not belong too much to
history. The apparent contradictions that will occur in this chapter
and seem to gainsay the emphatic sympathy of former chapters will be
found to be caused by this superseding of contemporary sympathy by
historical sympathy. As nothing can remain contemporary for very long,
we were obliged to assume this position if our criticism was to stand
before rather than behind its subject.
In discussing the difficulties which exist between contemporary poetry
and the contemporary reader, it is necessary to discuss also the
difficulties which the contemporary poet has had to face if he has
wished to write as a contemporary--to be included in the generation
to which by birth and personal sympathy he historically belongs. As
the poet, if a true poet, is one by nature and not by effort, he must
be seen writing as unconsciously as regards time as his ordinary
reader lives. For one remembers the date only by compulsion; no one
really feels older to-day than he felt yesterday. The relation of a
poet’s poetry to Poetry as a whole and to the time in which it is
written is the problem of criticism; and if this problem becomes part
of the making of a poem, it adds to the unconscious consciousness of
the poet when he is in the act of composition an alien element, a
_conscious_ consciousness which we may call the ‘historical effort’.
In reading poetry in which this alien element appears one must indeed
make the same historical effort if the full intention of the poem is
to be appreciated. Therefore the plain reader is likely to prefer to
modernist poetry of a past period, in which the historical effort,
wherever it has been present, has been absorbed or neutralized by the
automatic passing of the period into history.
The greatest difficulty is obviously to define ‘poetry as a whole’ from
the point of view of a _temporary_ personal consciousness--that
of the poet or reader--attempting to connect itself with a long-term
impersonal consciousness, an evolving professional sense. Yet it
is easier to do this now than formerly, since poetry, which was
once an all-embracing human activity, has been narrowed down by the
specialization of other general activities, such as religion and
the arts and sciences, into a technical branch of culture of the
most limited kind. It has been changed from a ‘humanity’ into an
‘art’; it has attempted to discipline itself with a professionalized
criticism which was not needed in the time of the balladists or in
primitive societies where poetry went hand in hand with magical
religion. Modern civilization seems to demand that the poet should
justify himself not only by writing poems but furthermore by proving
with each poem the contemporary legitimacy of poetry itself--the
professional authority of the term ‘poet’ in fact. And though in a few
rare cases the poet may succeed even now in writing by nature without
historical or professional effort, he is in general too conscious
of the forced professionalization of poetry to be able to avoid
justifying himself and his work professionally, that is, critically, as
a point of honour. Yet if he does admit poetry to be only one of the
specialized, professionalized activities of his period, like music,
painting, radiology, aerostatics, the cinema, modern tennis or morbid
psychology, he must see it as a very small patch on the time-chart,
a mere dot; because society allows less and less space for poetry in
its organisation. The only way that this dot on the time-chart can
provide itself with artificial dignity and space is through historical
depth; if its significance in a particular period is no greater than
the size of a dot on the period’s time-chart, then to make itself an
authoritative expression of this period it must extend this dot into
the past, it must make a historical straight line of it. Poetry becomes
the tradition of poetry.
The tradition of poetry, or rather of the art of poetry, then, is the
formal organization which the modernist poet finds himself serving as
an affiliated member. He must not only have a personal capacity for
poetry; that is merely an apprentice certificate. He must also have
a master’s sense of the historical experience of poetry--of its past
functions and usefulness, its present fitness and possibilities. He
must have a science of the ‘values’ of poetry, a scale of bad and good,
false and true, ephemeral and lasting; a theory of the tradition of
poetry in which successive period-poetries are historically judged
either favourably or unfavourably and in which his own period-poetry
is carefully adjusted to satisfy the values which the tradition is
believed to be continuously evolving. As this tradition is seen as a
logical historical development, these values, in their most recent
statement, are considered, if observed, sufficient to produce the
proper poetic expression of the age. So the poet has no longer to make
adjustment to his social environment, as the hero-celebrating bard of
the _Beowulf_ time or the religious poet of ancient Egypt had,
but critical adjustments to a special tradition of poetic values; and
to his own period only an indirect adjustment through the past, the
past seen as the poetry of the past narrowing down to the poetry of the
present.
The modernist poet therefore has an exaggerated preoccupation
with criticism. He has a professional conscience forced on him
by the encroachments and pressure of new period activities; and
this is understandable. When the prestige of any organization is
curtailed--the army or navy for example--a greater internal discipline,
morality and study of tactics results, a greater sophistication and
up-to-date-ness. In poetry this discipline means the avoidance of all
the wrongly-conceived habits and tactics of the past: poetry becomes
so sophisticated that it seems to know at last how it should be written
and written at the very moment. The more definitely activities like
religion, science, psychology and philosophy, which once existed in
poetry as loose sentiment, are specialized and confined to their proper
departmental technique, the more pure and sharp the technique of poetry
itself seems bound to become. It ceases to be civilized in the sense of
becoming more and more cultured with loose sentiment; everything in it
is particular and strict. It is, indeed, as if poetry were beginning as
at the beginning; using all its civilized sophistications to inaugurate
a carefully calculated, censored primitiveness.
This new primitive stage, however, has been implied rather than
reached in contemporary poetry. There is an increased strictness
and experimenting in the construction of the poem, and an increased
consciousness of what a poem should not be. But, so far, critical
self-consciousness has been only a negative element in the making of
poetry. It might seem that the atmosphere it has created would at
least make it easier for those who are poets by nature to write well,
by removing the temptation to write badly. But on the contrary it
hampers them with the consideration of all the poets who have ever
written or may be writing or may ever write--not only in the English
language but in all languages of the world under every possible social
organization. It invents a communal poetic mind which sits over the
individual poet whenever he writes; it binds him with the necessity of
writing correctly in extension of the tradition, the world-tradition of
poetry; and so makes poetry internally an even narrower period activity
than it is forced to be by outside influences. In consequence the
modernist generation is already over before its time, having counted
itself out and swallowed itself up by its very efficiency--a true ‘lost
generation’. Already, its most ‘correct’ writers, such as T. S. Eliot,
have become classics over the heads of the plain reader, having solved
the problem of taste, or period-fashion, so strictly and accurately
by themselves and having been so critically severe with themselves
beforehand, that their ‘acceptance’ by contemporary or future plain
readers has been made superfluous. Creation and critical judgement
being made one act, a work has no future history with readers; it is
ended when it is ended.
There has been, we see, a short and very concentrated period of
carefully disciplined and self-conscious poetry. It has been followed
by a pause in which no poetry of any certainty is appearing at all,
an embarrassed pause after an arduous and erudite stock-taking. The
next stage is not clear. But it is not impossible that there will
be a resumption of less eccentric, less strained, more critically
unconscious poetry, purified however by this experience of historical
effort. In the period just passing no new era was begun. A climax was
merely reached in criticism by a combination of sophistication and a
desire for a new enlightened primitiveness. Wherever attempts at sheer
newness in poetry were made they merely ended in dead movements. Yet
the new feeling in criticism did achieve something. It is true in the
more extreme cases that by turning into a critical philosophization of
itself, poetry ceased to be poetry: it became poetically introspective
philosophy. But this was perhaps necessary before poetry could be
normal without being vulgar, and deal naturally with truth without
being trite.
The abstract nature of poetry in this time became more important than
the poetic nature of the poet; the poet tried to write something better
than poetry, that is, the poetry of poetry. This laboratory phase,
this complex interrelation of metaphysics and psychology blighted the
creative processes wherever it was the predominant influence in the
actual moments of writing. Compare the highly organized nature of Mr.
Eliot’s criticism in its present stage with the gradual disintegration
of his poetry since the _Waste Land_. The poem, indeed, gained a
certain degree of freedom by the weakening of the personal relationship
between it and its creator, but this freedom was, on the other hand,
compromised by the forced relation of the poem to the historical period
to which it accidentally belonged. The time-element was made the
foundation of composition, and any poem which could not be related to
its period could not be said to have any immediate critical value, and
critical value was the only value by which poetry could become current.
The only virtue in this critical tyranny has been to make the world
in general more conscious of poetry in a specialized sense and more
conversant with its processes and problems.
Briefly, the developments which account for the historical effort which
has characterized the period are these. Poetry in the past had found
it expedient to accept barbaric philosophical or religious ‘ideas’ and
to cast itself within the limits imposed by them. They were barbaric
ideas because they were large but definite; infinite, yet fixed by the
way that they fixed man; crude and unshaded but incontestable--such
as the barbaric idea of God as compared with the civilized idea of
God (who is contestable if only in small points, while in barbaric
God there are no small points). A barbaric view or order depends on
the underlying conception of a crude, undifferentiated, infinite,
all-contemporaneous time, and of a humanity co-existent with this time,
a humanity consolidated as a mass and not composed of individuals. But
when the idea of humanity as a consolidated mass was discredited by
the Renaissance, the idea of gross contemporaneousness--of barbaric
time--also fell to pieces. Gross time was superseded by relative
time--the sense of many times going on at once; as we talk of the
suburbs being five years behind the town, of the country being ten
years behind the suburbs, of the colonies being ten years behind
the country, of the primitive community in Africa being a thousand
years behind the colonies; of an inventor being fifty years ahead of
commercial recognition. Living, in fact, in different communities of
time, or more than this, in different personalities of time, means
the same degree of freedom that living in barbaric time does. The
poet in the first case need make no historical effort because he has
such perfect control over time; he need make none in the second case
because time has such perfect control over him. Intense differentiation
of time is romanticism, strict uniformity and stabilization of time
is classicism. And it would be thought, considering that these
distinctions, however contradictory in appearance, did not affect
the poetry-making faculties in the poet himself, but only the look
of poetry as a whole, that criticism could go on using them without
prejudice; as verbal conveniences, for example, for describing
the general character of all poetry-making during a particular
period--chaotic and individualistic, or orderly and severely
conventionalized, as the case might be.
But when poetry began to lose caste among other cultural activities
by its diversification of professional method and manners, modernist
criticism found it convenient to attack this apparent lack of
professional coherence as romantic, to insist on the traditional
character of Poetry as an _art_, to reintroduce barbaric (or
‘classical’) time by emphasizing the element of contemporaneousness in
composition. When all other activities, particularly those classified
as scientific, were developing carefully relative time-senses,
poetry now attempted to stabilize itself by reverting to an absolute
time-sense. A relative time-sense in poetry was critically condemned
as vulgar, unprofessional, extravagant, because much that was vulgar,
falsely poetic and personally extravagant could in fact smuggle itself
into poetry under the guise of relativity. It seemed to criticism
hopeless and silly to attempt to repair the dignity of poetry by
demanding greater personal integrity in the poet. The only practicable
remedy seemed to be the declaration of an absolute which should bring
about immediate--if artificial--order and uniformity. For this,
however, an intellectual time-effort was necessary in workmanship which
stultified or deformed this workmanship. The absoluteness or barbarism
of the modern poet was an unhappy strained product of sophistications.
It is one thing to observe historically that at such and such a
period an idea of humanity, time and art, each consolidated as a
mass, prevailed, and that a peculiarly fixed kind of perfection, as
in Egyptian art, appeared in this period. But it is another thing to
try to give such an idea of consolidation artificially to poetry: that
it is creating not poetry but historical criticism. Such an attempt
to submerge all separate poetic faculties in a single professional
communism would by its simplicity be naturally pleasing to criticism;
but the more simple in theory, the more complicated in practice. In
a natural classical period the elaborate complexity of the personal
poetic faculty--at any time nearly insoluble--becomes soluble because
the demands made on it for conformity are superficial, formal,
ritualistic. The poetic faculty does not only have to betray its
complexity in an artificially classical period. The poetic faculty
itself is called upon to invent the rituals by which it is to become
formalized; to do the impossible, in other words--to invent simplicity
with complexity. Which explains why there is more eccentric variety
in this modernist classicism than ever appeared in romanticism. The
early nineteenth-century poets wrote so similarly principally because,
in spite of their individualistic propensities and their private
purposes or passions, they were historically one in reacting against
the same sort of classicism, and were never, moreover, able to get
beyond serving this reaction; modernism, in the early nineteenth
century, meant reaction. Modernism in the early twentieth century has
also meant reaction, a reaction against reaction, setting itself the
impossible task of individually but not individualistically creating a
new classicism--a classicism founded on a philosophical theory which
each poet was bound to interpret differently because he was not, so to
speak, classically born.
The habit of philosophy is to observe and from observations to
order conduct; to generalize from particulars and to simplify its
generalities, in search of a code of perfection: and thus to minimize
the reality of variation, digression, error in order to arrive at
a single barbaric whole. Pure philosophy is thus always classical
in spirit. When the relativist idea of personality began to break
down classical social formality, pure philosophy grew more and more
feeble. Philosophy could either devote itself to attacking caprice
(it could fight the battle of classicism against romanticism), or it
could become romantic--that is, it could allow itself to decay. This
in the main is what it did, any other alternatives being generally
too obscure, unhistorical and eccentric to be attractive. The chance,
however, eventually came to philosophy of reviving its old authority
as the science of sciences against the encroachment of modern
differentiation and specialization, in a prospective alliance with
poetry, which originally had first-class and general significance as
the undifferentiated art of arts in a barbaric order. Poetry itself,
dissatisfied with the position to which it had been reduced by the
romantic nineteenth century--a position in which it seemed to be
allowed to exist only by the humour and grace of science--was, of
course, favourably inclined to such an alliance. And so began the new
classicism.
This alliance, in the beginning only a sentimental one, needed to be
legalized by some tame philosopher, some Aristotle of modernism who
would make the new barbarism respectable and provide it with a coherent
argument and a vocabulary. Such a person was found in T. E. Hulme,
who was killed in 1917 before he had developed a well-defined system
of aesthetics; who had, however, left enough fragments to be accepted
as gospel by a generation starved for suitable philosophico-literary
dogma. Hulme was, naturally, a man disappointed with philosophy since
the Renaissance. It was no longer ‘pure’; and, searching for a way to
purify it, he stumbled on the need which art--painting or sculpture or
poetry--had to be philosophically organized and corrected. His concept
of the absolute (the search for the absolute is the chief concern, as
we have seen, of ‘pure’ philosophy) derided any idea of relativity:
it emphasized the general principle of poetic co-ordination; but the
general principle rather than the form in which co-ordination should
take place. It is significant that the few poems Hulme wrote himself
fall under the period classification popular in his time, Imagism. In
his desire to co-ordinate and correctly generalize, Hulme fell into
the familiar philosophical confusion--the confusion of analogy. Art,
for instance, is a philosophical term invented for the convenience
of classification, not a term that poetry would naturally invent for
itself, though painting and sculpture, on the other hand, might. To
the philosopher, however, the most accurate term is the most general
rather than the most particular, and so to Hulme a common co-ordination
of the ‘arts’ of painting, sculpture and poetry seemed possible and
necessary. The fundamental fallacy in such an attempted co-ordination
appears with the difficulty which poetry has to face in entering a new
artificially barbaric era. In painting and sculpture neither colour
nor stone had been intrinsically affected by the romantic works in
which they had been used. To escape the Renaissance, painting and
sculpture merely had to revert to barbaric modes--negroid, Oceanic,
Aztec, Egyptian, Chinese, archaic Greek--creating modern forms as if
in primitive times; forms primitive, obedient to the conventions which
they accepted, therefore final, absolute, ‘abstract’. But poetry could
not seemingly submit itself to an _as if_, because its expressive
medium, language, had been intrinsically affected not only by the works
in which it had been used but also by all the non-poetic uses of which
language is capable. This difference between poetry and more regular
arts points to a variance in poetry and suggests the probable falsity
of all philosophical generalizations on art. The falsity is the falsity
of analogy; yet analogy is the strongest philosophical instrument of
co-ordination. Since poetry as an art is not sufficiently regular,
not sufficiently professional, it is to become so by being made more
sculptural or pictorial, by having grafted on it the values and methods
of more professional arts.
Language, therefore, had to be reorganized, used as if afresh, cleansed
of its experience: to be as ‘pure’ and ‘abstract’ as colour or stone.
Words had to be reduced to their least historical value; the purer they
could be made, the more eternally immediate and present they would be;
they could express the absolute at the same time as they expressed the
age. Or this was at any rate the logical effect of scientific barbarism
if taken literally.
Gertrude Stein is perhaps the only artisan of language who has ever
succeeded in practising scientific barbarism literally. Her words are
primitive in the sense that they are bare, immobile, mathematically
placed, abstract: so primitive indeed that the theorists of the new
barbarism have repudiated her work as a romantic vulgar barbarism,
expressing the personal crudeness of a mechanical age rather than a
refined historical effort to restore a lost absolute to a community
of co-ordinated poets. Mr. Eliot has said of her work that “it is not
improving, it is not amusing, it is not interesting, it is not good for
one’s mind. But its rhythms have a peculiar hypnotic power not met with
before. It has a kinship with the saxophone. If this is the future
then the future is, as it very likely is, of the barbarians. But this
is the future in which we ought not to be interested.” Mr. Eliot was
for the moment speaking for civilization. He was obliged to do this
because it seemed suddenly impossible to reconcile the philosophy of
the new barbarism with the historical state of the poetic mind and with
the professional dignity of poetry which the new barbarism was invented
to restore: a sincere attempt to do so was at once crude and obscure
like the work of Miss Stein. Except for such whole-hog literalness
as hers, professional modernist poetry has lacked the co-ordination
which professional modernist criticism implies: and this contradiction
between criticism and workmanship makes it incoherent. It has been too
busy being civilized, varied, intellectual--too socially and poetically
energetic--to take advantage of the privileged consistency of the new
barbarism.
Criticism has been so busy talking about criticism (criticism has been
so philosophical, that is) that it has had little either relevant or
helpful to say about poetry itself--not poetry as a philosophical
abstraction but as _poems_ and as the poets, who are potential
poems. Though objecting to the romantic disorganization in which there
are ‘beauties’ instead of beauty, it has nevertheless had no absolute
canon of beauty to offer to the classical poetry it has wished to
inspire, but only an undifferentiated satire of beauties and a counsel
to suppress the obvious because the obvious is often romantically,
personally and therefore sentimentally beautiful. It has insisted
that a fixed dogmatic abstract beauty is the only possible system
for poetic perfection and yet has had nothing better to offer than a
few elementary suggestions and clues such as that ‘golden lad’ is a
beautiful classical phrase and ‘golden youth’ a beautiful romantic
phrase (Hulme). “The thing has got so bad now”, wrote Hulme, “that a
poem which is all dry and hard, a properly Classical poem, would not be
considered poetry at all. They cannot see that accurate description is
a legitimate object of verse.”
Hulme was asking a forward-looking twentieth-century generation to
arm itself against romanticism, an early nineteenth-century bogey,
or against the Renaissance bogey itself. He wanted to oppose a
sophisticated levity to the idiot-headed seriousness of romanticism,
a classical fancy to a romantic imagination; but in practice the
opposition was of a heavy, rigid, originally dull seriousness to a
rather ingenuous sometimes successful often droll though perhaps
eventually dull seriousness. “Wonder must cease to be wonder”, Hulme
complained: but in the beginning while there is wonder there is always
the chance of a surprise success in romanticism. In classicism, which
sets out with a very limited, certain intention, there is never the
chance of success in this sense. If romantic freakishness generally
quiets down to triteness and is for this reason dull, classical
freakishness is fixed and eternal from the outset; and thus eternally
dull.
The most serious flaw in poetic modernism has been its attachment
to originality. The modernist poet has not been able to forsake
originality however directly it might contradict the classical idea
of discipline; and the effect of discipline has therefore only been
to make originality more original. As originality increased and as
modernist poetry consequently became more and more romantic, the
contradiction between it and modernist criticism was intensified.
Criticism became more dogmatic and unreal, poetry more eccentric and
chaotic. Classicism and originality could only be reconciled in the
invention of an original type, were this possible, of a form entirely
new, peculiar, particular, uncommon, and yet universal, general,
common; when once invented, as old as the hills. But obviously the
invention of an original type in personal embodiments can get no
further than an earnest caricature of the ordinary, as in Joyce’s
Leopold Blum, or T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock and other low types; no further
certainly in mechanical embodiments. Originality becomes an attack on a
degenerated ordinary.
The problem was further complicated by the insistence (as in Hulme)
on the ‘direct communication’ by which originality was to make
itself effective; direct communication referring to an immediate
ideal intelligibility. But since language had been tainted by false
experiences, much of the energy of this originality had to be devoted
to an attack on the ordinary language of communication; and direct
communication, like the original type, could get no further than an
earnest caricature of ordinary language. This is from Mr. Eliot’s most
recent stage:
DUSTY: Do you know London well, Mr. Krumpacker?
KLIPSTEIN: No, we have never been here before.
KRUMPACKER: We hit this town last night for the first time.
KLIPSTEIN: And I certainly hope it won’t be the last time.
DORIS: You like London, Mr. Klipstein?
KRUMPACKER: Do we like London? Do we like London!
Do we like London!! Eh, what Klip?
KLIPSTEIN: Say, Miss--er--uh! London’s swell.
We like London fine.
KRUMPACKER: Perfectly slick.
DUSTY: Why don’t you come and live here then?
But caricature is romantic. Miss Edith Sitwell’s poetry is perhaps the
clearest instance of the romantic caricature of language that critical
classicism is obliged to take under its wing.
Another aspect of the same general flaw is the incompatibility of the
‘things’ which were supposed to be revealed in the direct communication
(‘things’ in which apparently the first principle inheres) with
the talent of the artist to see things ‘as no one else sees them’.
The barbaric absolute, the divine source of things, wherever it
has prevailed naturally, has always been marked by a penetrating
obviousness. The pyramids are penetratingly obvious, so much so that
they nearly make the absolute synonymous with obviousness.
But a belief in the fundamental obviousness or absoluteness of ‘things’
is inconsistent with a belief in an eccentricity in things which
the artist is supposed to reveal: and a belief in the fundamental
obviousness or ordinariness of a mass humanity, adhering personally
to the same absolute to which ‘things’ adhere, is inconsistent with a
belief in the creative originality which is to reveal the eccentricity
latent in obviousness to this mass humanity equipped only to seize
the obvious. The only possible way for creative originality to be
consistent with mass humanity is by some mystical process in which the
artist is chosen as the inspired instrument of mass-ordinariness to
reveal ‘things’ which he sees as no one else sees because everything is
so obvious and everyone so ordinary that one does not ordinarily ‘see’
the obviousness and ordinariness unless one is possessed of creative
originality.
While such a philosophical tangle was forcing modernist poets into
an unwitting romanticism, Gertrude Stein went on--and kept going on
for twenty years--quietly, patiently and successfully practising an
authentic barbarism; quite by herself and without encouragement.
Her only fault, from the practical point of view, was that she took
primitiveness too literally, so literally that she made herself
incomprehensible to the exponents of primitivism--to everyone for that
matter. She exercised perfect discipline over her creative faculties
and she was able to do this because she was completely without
originality. Everybody being unable to understand her thought that this
was because she was too original or was trying hard to be original.
But she was only divinely inspired in ordinariness: her creative
originality, that is, was original only because it was so grossly, so
humanly, all-inclusively ordinary. She used language automatically
to record pure ultimate obviousness. She made it capable of direct
communication not by caricaturing contemporary language--attacking
decadence with decadence--but by purging it completely of its false
experiences. None of the words Miss Stein uses ever had experience.
They are no older than the use she makes of them, and she has been
herself no older than her age conceived barbarically.
Put it there in there where they have it
Put it there in there there and they halve it
Put it there in there there and they have it
Put it there in there there and they halve it
These words have had no history, and the design that Miss Stein
has made of them is literally ‘abstract’ and mathematical because
they are commonplace words without any hidden etymology; they are
mechanical and not eccentric. If they possess originality it is that of
mass-automatism.
Miss Stein in her _Composition as Explanation_ has written:
Nothing changes from generation to generation except the thing seen,
and that makes a composition.
Her admission that there are generations does not contradict her belief
in an unvarying first principle. Time does not vary, only the sense of
time.
Automatically with the acceptance of the time-sense comes the
recognition of the beauty, and once the beauty is accepted the beauty
never fails anyone.
Beauty has no history, according to Miss Stein, nor has time: only the
time-sense has history. When the time-sense acclaims a beauty that
was not at first recognized, the finality of this beauty is at once
established; it is as though it had never been denied. All beauty is
equally final. The reason why the time-sense if realized reveals the
finality or classicalness of beauty, is that it is the feeling of
beginning, of primitiveness and freshness which is each age’s or each
generation’s version of time.
Beginning again and again and again explaining composition and time
is a natural thing. It is understood by this time that everything is
the same except composition and time, composition and the time of the
composition and the time in the composition.
Originality of vision, then, is invented, she holds, not by the artist
but by the collective time-sense. The artist does not see things ‘as
no one else sees them’. He sees those objective ‘things’ by which the
age repeatedly verifies and represents the absolute. He sees concretely
and expressibly what everyone else possessed of the time-sense has
an unexpressed intuition of: the time-sense may not be generally and
particularly universal; but this does not mean that the artist’s
vision, even his originality of vision, is less collective or less
universal.
The composition is the thing seen by everyone living in the living
they are doing, they are the composing of the composition that at the
time they are living is the composition of the time in which they are
living. It is that that makes living a thing they are doing. Nothing
else is different, of that almost anyone can be certain. The time
when and the time of and the time in that composition is the natural
phenomena of that composition and of that perhaps everyone can be
certain.
All this Gertrude Stein has understood and executed logically because
of the perfect simplicity of her mind. Believing implicitly in an
absolute, she has not been bothered to doubt the bodily presence of
a first principle in her own time. Since she is alive and everybody
around her seems to be alive, of course there is an acting first
principle, there is composition. This first principle provides a
theme for composition because there is time, and everybody, and the
beginning again and again and again, and composition. In her primitive
good-humour she has not found it necessary to trouble about defining
the theme. The theme is to be inferred from the composition. The
composition is clear because the language means nothing but what it
means through her using of it. The composition is final because it is
‘a more and more continuous present including more and more using of
everything and continuing more and more beginning and beginning and
beginning’. She creates this atmosphere of continuousness principally
by her progressive use of the tenses of verbs, by intense and
unflagging repetitiousness and an artificially assumed and regulated
child-mentality: the child’s time-sense is so vivid that an occurrence
is always consecutive to itself, it goes on and on, it has been going
on and on, it will be going on and on (a child does perhaps feel the
passage of time, does to a certain extent feel itself older than it was
yesterday because yesterday was already to-morrow even while it was
yesterday).
This is from Miss Stein’s _Saints in Season_:
Saint--
A Saint
Saint and very well I thank you.
Two in bed.
Two in bed.
Yes two in bed.
They had eaten.
Two in bed.
They had eaten.
Two in bed.
She says weaken.
If she said.
She said two in bed.
She said they had eaten.
She said yes two in bed.
She said weaken.
Do not acknowledge to me that seven are said that a
Saint and seven that it is said that a saint in seven
that there is said to be a saint in seven.
Now as to illuminations.
They are going to illuminate and everyone is to put into
their windows their most beautiful object and everyone
will say and the streets will be crowded everyone
will say look at it.
They do say look at it.
To look at it. They will look at it. They will say
look at it.
Repetition has the effect of breaking down the possible historical
senses still inherent in the words. So has the infantile jingle of
rhyme and assonance. So has the tense-changing of verbs, because
restoring to them their significance as a verbal mathematics of motion.
Miss Stein’s persistence in her own continuousness is astonishing: this
is how she wrote in 1926, and in 1906. She has achieved a continuous
present by always beginning again, for this keeps everything different
and everything the same. It creates duration but makes it absolute by
preventing anything from happening in the duration.
And after that what changes what changes after that, after that what
changes and what changes after that and after that and what changes
and after that and what changes after that.
The composition has a theme because it has no theme. The words are a
self-pursuing, tail-swallowing series and are thus thoroughly abstract.
They achieve what Hulme called but could not properly envisage--not
being acquainted, it seems, with Miss Stein’s work--a ‘perpendicular’,
an escape from the human horizontal plane. They contain no reference;
no meaning, no caricatures, no jokes, no despairs. They are ideally
automatic, creating one another. The only possible explanation of lines
like the following is that one word or combination of words creates the
next.
Anyhow means furls furls with a chance chance with a change change
with as strong strong with as will will with as sign sign with as west
west with as most most with as in in with as by by with as change
change with as reason reason to be lest lest they did when when they
did for for they did there and then. Then does not celebrate the there
and then.
This is repetition and continuousness and beginning again and again and
again.
Nothing that we have said here should be understood as disrespectful to
Gertrude Stein. She has had courage, clarity, sincerity, simplicity.
She has created a human mean in language, a mathematical equation of
ordinariness which leaves one with a tender respect for that changing
and unchanging slowness that is humanity and Gertrude Stein.
Miss Stein’s sterilization of words until they are exhausted of history
and meaning must be distinguished from sophisticated abandonment
of meaning in the midst of a feverish pursuit of meaning, a blasé
renouncement of significance to confusion. The following from a poem by
Mr. Sacheverell Sitwell is an instance of such a renouncement:
Y. “... a thundering motor
drumming its persistence on the giggling air.
Persistence, and I mean the everlasting life....
And in feet the rolling drums should rattle in the square
before a thick curtain that no eye can pierce
And trumpets should sound out from all the square-set towers....
Persistence, I said--I mean the giggling air,
rather I should say I mean the giggling drums
or rolling drums: persistence--and I mean the....”
X. “... persistent air?...”
Y. “No, no: Persistence, and I mean the giggling air;
I meant to talk about the everlasting life,
Until you muddled me and made me stop.”
Miss Stein’s tidy processes must also be distinguished from the
deliberate untidying of language to give it more meaning, more history,
more dramatic excitement, as in James Joyce’s _Ulysses_:
The Quaker librarian, quaking, tiptoed in, quake, his mask, quake,
with haste, quake, quack.
Door closed. Cell. Day.
They list. Three. They.
I you he they.
Come, mess.
This needs only to be accurately read in the rather complicated
context, to be tidied into its context, so to speak, to make obvious
sense. Even the following poem by E. E. Cummings is neither pure nor
abstract, but realistic, wilfully linked to history.
life hurl my
yes, crumbles hand (ful released conarefetti) ev eryflitter,
inga, where
mil (lions of aflickf) litter ing brightmillion ofS hurl;
edindodg: ing
whom are Eyes shy-dodge is bright cruMbshandful,
quick-hurl edinwho
Is flittercrumbs, fluttercrimbs are floatfallin,g; allwhere:
a: crimflitterinish, is arefloatsis ingfallall! mil, shy,
milbrightlions
my (hurl flicker handful
in) dodging are shybrigHteyes is crum bs(alll)if, ey, Es[2]
It is an attempt to represent, in the manner of the early futurists,
the book of life torn into a million fragments as small as confetti,
the bread of life crumbled nervously under the disorganizing influence
of shy bright eyes, bright like the million stars. A most romantic
theme and a most romantic treatment, but Mr. Cummings was never
apprenticed to the new barbarism; he is a freebooter.
One way the modernist poet has of keeping romantically alive in
this classicism, whether or not he goes as far as Gertrude Stein’s
automatism, is by carefully avoiding a theme. When Mr. Allen Tate
says, for instance, in his introduction to Hart Crane’s _White
Buildings_ that Mr. Crane has not yet found a theme to match his
poetic vision, he is really explaining that Mr. Crane is preserving
his vision from a theme, that his vision is reacting romantically
against contemporary classicism. Hart Crane’s poems reveal many of the
qualities peculiar to enforced romantics: it is noticeable that Mr.
Tate allies him with other enforced romantics--Poe, Rimbaud, Edith
Sitwell, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens--though Mr. Crane has sufficient
dignity to be able to dispense with such literary support. Much of the
intensity of his poetry--intensity often protracted into strain--is due
to the conflict between discipline and originality. The result is a
compromise in the mysticism of rhetoric:
Bind us in time, O Seasons clear, and awe.
O minstrel galleons of Carib fire,
Bequeath us to no earthly shore until
Is answered in the vortex of our grave
The seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.
This romantic mysticism of rhetoric--romantic because discipline merges
with originality rather than originality with discipline--results in
a mysticism of geography, not to say of subjects. The movements of
his poems are the fluctuations of surfaces: they give a sea-sense of
externality: the moon, the sea, frost, tropical horizons, the monotony
of continuous exploration. Their direction is classical; that is, they
tend to become mechanical by a sort of ecstasy of technical excellence:
O I have known metallic paradises
Where cuckoos clucked to finches
Above the deft catastrophes of drums.
While titters hailed the groans of death
Beneath gyrating awnings I have seen
The incunabula of the divine grotesque.
This music has a reassuring way.
And here he would rest if he did not, in his restraint ‘have extreame’,
have what he calls ‘fine collapses’--
We can evade you and all else but the heart:
What blame to us if the heart live on?
By such fine collapses, composition just manages to escape with its
life--beginning again and again and again in spite of its posthumous
classicism.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 2: It has been found impracticable in the printing of this
poem to set it vertically on the page, as it was originally printed--to
suggest a downward fluttering movement.]
INDEX OF PRINCIPAL PROPER NAMES
Acton, Harold, 201
A. E., 166
Aiken, Conrad, 166
Aldington, Richard, 216, 217
Anglo-Irish mystics, 124
Aristotle, 191, 208
Baedeker, 242
Baudelaire, 39
Beddoes, T. L., 81, 173
Belloc, Hilaire, 17
_Beowulf_, author of, 262
Binyon, L., 220
Blake, William, 195, 196, 198
Blunden, Edmund, 176
Bottomley, Gordon, 220
Brahms, 96
Bridges, Dr. Robert, 92, 93
Brooke, Rupert, 120, 164
Browning, R., 158, 160, 161,
183, 197, 236
Burns, Robert, 173, 195
Bynner, Witter, 166
Byron, Lord, 176, 192, 193,
197-199, 224, 236, 241
Calverley, C. S., 37
Campbell, T., 197
Canaletto, 239
Catullus, 252-254
Chalmers, A., 78
Chaucer, G., 173
Chesterton, G. K., 17
Clare, John, 195
Coleridge, S. T., 95, 99, 105,
158, 192-193
Colman, G., 244
Crane, Hart, 47, 289-291
Cummings, E. E., 9-34, 38-41,
44, 59-64, 84-88, 100, 131-134,
153, 174, 187, 201-202,
217, 245-247, 249-250, 252,
288-289
Cunard, Nancy, 165, 201
Darley, G., 173
David, King, 48
Davidson, Donald, 209, 211, 214
Davidson, John, 184
Davies, W. H., 200-201
Debussy, 96
de Gourmont, Rémy, 14
de Saint Pierre, B., 235
de Vere, Aubrey, 197
Dickinson, Emily, 122, 183
Dobson, Austin, 116
Doolittle, Hilda (“H.D.”), 121-123,
204, 217
Doughty, C. M., 199
Drinkwater, J., 100, 111-112
Dryden, J., 173
Duck, Stephen, 194
Ecclesiastes, 222, 225
Eliot, T. S., 50-53, 165, 167-174,
201-202, 211-215, 217,
223, 235-242, 252, 264, 265,
275, 278, 289
Euripides, 176
Fletcher, John, 168, 170
Flint, F. S., 217
France, Anatole, 225
Frazer, Sir James, 171-172
Frost, Robert, 176-177
Gautier, 234
Gay, J., 243
Georgians, the, 118-120, 221
Goldsmith, Oliver, 37
Gongora, 218
Gosse, Sir Edmund, 116
Graves, Richard, 196
Gray, Thomas, 30
Greene, R., 44
Guedalla, Philip, 206
Haldane, J. B. S., 167
Hardy, Thomas, 198, 225
Hemans, Felicia, 99
Hemingway, Ernest, 223
Homer, 252
Hood, Thomas, 37
Hopkins, G. M., 90-94
Housman, A. E., 198
Hulme, T. E., 272-278, 286
Imagists, the, 116-124, 131, 135, 204, 272
Japanese poets, the, 28, 217
Jonson, Ben, 241
Joyce, James, 107, 203, 204,
256, 278, 288
Keats, John, 95, 99, 158, 160,
170, 171, 192-195, 208
Kydd, T., 45, 173
La Rousse, 242
Lawrence, D. H., 167
Lefanu, Joseph Sheridan, 244
Le Gallienne, Richard, 186
Leigh Hunt, J. H., 195
Lindsay, Vachel, 180
Lodge, 44
Longfellow, H. W., 105
Lyly, J., 44, 173
Mallarmé, 28
Malone, E., 78
Marlowe, Christopher, 44, 45, 80
Marvell, Andrew, 173
Masefield, J., 244
Meikle, J., 99
Mendes, Catulle, 234
Milton, John, 17, 31, 55, 56,
173, 204
Montgomery, R., 99
Moore, Marianne, 111-114, 168,
185-186, 249
Moore, Thomas, 99, 197
Morris, J. W., 250
Nashe, T., 44
Nichols, Robert, 184-185
Noyes, Alfred, 167
Ossian, 208
Owen, Wilfred, 121, 164
Peele, G., 44, 173
Philips, Ambrose, 196
Picasso, P., 202, 204
Poe, E. A., 38-39, 57, 191, 197,
289
Pope, Alexander, 159, 196
Pound, Ezra, 140, 141, 172,
180, 187, 204, 216-219
Pre-Raphaelites, the, 197
Prewett, Frank, 176, 205
Ransom, John Crowe, 100, 103-109,
209, 211, 214, 229-230, 252
Read, Herbert, 167
Rimbaud, 28, 32, 289
Rogers, Samuel, 99, 159
Rosenberg, Isaac, 121, 220-222
Rousseau, J. J., 252
Ruskin, John, 236
Sandburg, Carl, 100-102
Sassoon, Siegfried, 176-177
Shakespeare, W., 9, 10, 44-46,
62-82, 108, 151, 173, 190,
237-243, 252
Shelley, P. B., 95, 99, 158, 192-193,
195, 198
Shenstone, W., 99, 196
Sitwell, Edith, 167, 175, 201,
203, 204, 217, 223, 231-235,
247-249, 279, 289
Sitwell, Osbert, 210-213
Sitwell, Sacheverell, 167-171,
185, 232, 234, 287
Sorley, Charles, 121
Spenser, Edmund, 173, 208
Steevens, George, 77-78
Stein, Gertrude, 204, 223, 274-275,
280-289
Stevens, W., 166, 216, 217, 289
Surrey, Earl of, 45
Swift, Jonathan, 173
Swinburne, A. C., 197, 208
Symons, Arthur, 116
Tagore, Rabindranath, 17
Tate, Allen, 213-215, 252-254,
289
Tennyson, Lord, 31, 37, 49-55,
158, 160-163, 167, 182, 197,
208
Thompson, Francis, 158, 159,
208
Traherne, 198
Tupper, Martin, 99, 193, 197
Turner, W. J., 167
Untermeyer, Louis, 11, 26
Valéry, Paul, 29, 30, 35-38,
42-43
Vers Librists, the, 119, 145
Virgil, 50
Wagner, 96
Webster, J., 173, 212
Whitman, Walt, 99, 197, 208
Wilde, O., 197, 199, 208
Williams, Dr. W. C., 201-204,
216-217
Wolfe, Humbert, 222
Wordsworth, William, 95, 96,
99, 158, 159, 173, 181, 186,
192-195, 197, 215
Wyatt, Sir T., 45
Yeats, W. B., 178
THE END.
=TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES=
Simple typographical errors have been silently corrected; unbalanced
quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and
otherwise left unbalanced.
Punctuation and spelling were made consistent when a predominant
preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not
changed.
Inconsistent hyphens left as printed.