Chapter II: Front Matter (2)

I watch him
And a quick desire comes over me
Of those slim hips,
Those long! clean! slender limbs
That stand for health, and for the sheer
Keen beauty of the body.
I desire him.
And I desire the spirit of the man,
The bodily fearlessness,
The reckless courage in a swaddled age.
I desire him.
How lithe and firm would be the child
Of such a man....

A Young American Poet

RICHARD ALDINGTON

It is the defect of English, and in a lesser degree of American, criticism that such criticisms as are not merely commercial are doctrinaire. The critic, that is to say, comes to judge a work of art not with an open mind but with a whole horde of prejudices, ignorances, and eruditions which he terms “critical standards.” “A work of art,” you can hear him say, “must be this, must be that, must be the other,” when indeed a work of art may well be no such thing. Just now the cry is all for “modernity,” for lyrical outbursts in praise of machinery, of locomotion, and of violence. And the “critics” obediently fill their minds with these prejudices until at length you discover them solemnly declaring that a work of art has no value except it treat of machinery, of locomotion or of kindred subjects! I have yet to find the critic who approaches his job in the right spirit; who asks himself first, What has the artist attempted to do?, and then, Has he succeeded? The commercial critic is of course the more reprehensible; the doctrinaire critic is nevertheless a serious menace to that liberty of the arts of which one cannot be too jealous. In England especially the doctrinaire critic reigns. Yesterday it was all Nietzsche; then Bergson; now there is a wild fight between a dozen “isms,” combats between traditional imbeciles and revolutionary imbeciles. So that one spends half one’s time becoming an “ist” and the rest of the time in getting rid of the title.

The neglect of the poems of the young American poet—H. D.—who is the subject of this article, is due, I think to the following facts. The author, who apparently possesses a great degree of self-criticism, produces a very small bulk of work and most of it is lost in magazines; such work as attained publicity was judged, before being read, from its surroundings; the work being original, seemed obscure and wantonly destructive of classic English models (you must remember that there are very, very few people in England who have the faintest idea of what is meant by vers libre); the use of initials rather frightened people; and the author had no friends among the professional critics.

Now America has this advantage over most European countries that its inhabitants are mostly willing to accept a fresh view of things. The lack of a “tradition” has advantages as well as disadvantages. An American author, then, is less likely to see things in a conventional way, and is less likely to be deterred from any novel and personal method of expression. (For in 1911, when H. D. began to write the poems I am considering, vers libre was practically unheard of outside France.)

If I were asked to define the chief quality of H. D.’s work I should say: “I can only explain it by a paradox; it is a kind of accurate mystery.” And I should go on to quote the ballad of Sir Patric Spens in which from a cloudy, vague, obscure atmosphere, where nothing is precise, where there is no “story,” no obvious relation between the ideas, certain objects stand out very sharply and clearly with a very keen effect, objects like “the bluid-red wine,” “the braid letter,” the young moon in the old moon’s arms, and the ladies with “their fans intil their hands.” And then I should go on to say that this “accurate mystery” came from the author’s brooding over—not locomotives and machinery—but little corners of gardens, a bit of a stream in some Pennsylvanian meadow, from memories of afternoons along the New Jersey coast, or of a bowl of flowers. Curious, mysterious, rather obscure sort of broodings with startling and very accurate renderings of detail. And then I should explain the author’s use of Hellenic terms and of the rough unaccented metres of Attic choruses and Melic lyrics—like those fragments of Alcaeus and Ibycus and Erinna—by pointing out that it is in those poems—the choruses in the Bacchae, for example—that this particular kind of brooding over nature found its best expression.

Let me quote a portion of a poem to illustrate these qualities: the quality which I have called “accurate mystery,” the quality of brooding over nature and the quality of spontaneous kinship with certain aspects of Hellenic poetry. I take it that, if one liked to be specifically modern the poem could be called “Wind on the New Jersey Coast.” But the author’s innate sense of mystery, of aloofness, just like that of the anonymous author of Sir Patric Spens, makes her place the action in some vague, distant place and time. Though it be contrary to current opinion I hold that the poem gains by this.

HERMES OF THE WAYS

The hard sand breaks,
And the grains of it are clear as wine.

Far off over the leagues of it,
The wind,
Playing on the wide shore,
Piles little ridges,
And the great waves break over it.

But more than the many-foamed ways
Of the sea,
I know him
Of the triple path-ways,
Hermes,
Who awaiteth.

Dubious,
Facing three ways,
Welcoming wayfarers,
He whom the sea-orchard shelters from the west,
From the east
Weathers sea-wind;
Fronts the great dunes.

Wind rushes
Over the dunes,
And the coarse, salt-crusted grass
Answers.

Heu,
It whips round my ankles!—etc., etc.

I am not willing to have that poem read quickly and cursorarily, as one reads a column of newspaper print. It must be read with some of the close, intense attention with which it was written. Each word and phrase were most carefully considered and arranged. The reader must remember that the object of such writing is not to convey information but to create in the reader a mood, an emotion, a sense of atmosphere. Mr. Yeats is right when he complains that newspapers have spoiled our sense of poetry; we expect poetry to tell us some piece of news, and indeed poetry has no news to tell anyone. Its object is simply to arouse an emotion, and no emotion is ever aroused in a person who skims through a piece of poetry as he skims through a journal.

When I read that poem I have evoked in me a picture—like a picture of Courbet or Boudin—of a white sea roaring on to yellow sands under a bright sky, with the wind sweeping and whistling in the dunes. And I have a feeling that it is a magic sort of picture, of somewhere a great way off, where it would not surprise me to find the image of a god at the cross-roads, with the offerings of simple people about the pedestal. And at the same time I always remember bathing from some sand-dunes near Rye, in Sussex, on a very windy afternoon, when the sand blinded me and the sharp grass cut my ankles as I ran down to the water.

I cannot, of course, tell what sort of an effect such writing has on other people. It may be that I am especially sensitive to it. But let me quote another of the author’s poems, conveying a totally different mood.

SITALKAS

Thou art come at length
More beautiful than any cool god
In a chamber under Lycia’s far coast,
Than any high god who touches us not
Here in the seeded grass.
Aye, than Argestes,
Scattering the broken leaves.

If you ask me to say precisely what that “means” I could only explain it in this way. When I read that poem I experience the emotions I should expect to receive if I were lying in a sunny meadow on some hot late September afternoon—somewhere far inland, where there would be a great silence broken very gently by the rustle of the heavy headed grass and by the stir of falling beech leaves—somewhere so far inland, somewhere so hot, that it would come as a shock of delighted surprise to think of a “cool god in a chamber under Lycia’s far coast.” It does not annoy me that I have never been to Lycia, that I have no more idea who Sitalkas and Argestes were than who Sir Patric Spens was; it is all one; I get my impression just the same, which, I take it, is what the author aimed at. And indeed the odd unknown names give it a very agreeable sense of mystery and of aloofness.

Such are some of the qualities of the work of the young American who hides her identity under the initials H. D. I believe her work is quite unknown in America, though, before the war, I remember seeing some comment on it in a French literary paper. It was in another French review that a critic complained that this author was not interested in aeroplanes and factory chimneys. Somehow I feel quite coldly about factory chimneys when I read sudden intense outbursts of poetry like those I have quoted and like this:

The light of her face falls from its flower
As a hyacinth,
Hidden in a far valley,
Perishes upon burnt grass.

Editorials and Announcements

_On Criticism_

There is something particularly delightful to me in reviewing John Cowper Powys’s book, _Visions and Revisions_, in THE LITTLE REVIEW. For Mr. Powys, though quite unconscious of it, was one of the main inspirations behind the coming-to-be of this magazine. Two years ago we heard him lecture on Pater and Arnold and came from that rite determined, if possible, to reflect something of his attitude, his critical appreciation, in a magazine. I remember the thrill of it very vividly: “_That is criticism!_” we said. And so I am going to let Mr. Powys speak for us by quoting almost the entire preface from his new volume with its critical essays on Rabelais, Dante, Shakespeare, El Greco, Milton, Lamb, Arnold, Shelley, Keats, Nietzsche, Hardy, Dostoevsky, Poe, and others. I am sure that, as THE LITTLE REVIEW’S godfather, he will not mind being quoted so at length:

“Most books of critical essays take upon themselves with unpardonable effrontery, to weigh and judge from their own petty suburban pedestal, the great Shadows they review. It is an insolence! How should Professor This, or Doctor That, whose furthest adventures of ‘dangerous living’ have been squalid philanderings with their neighbors’ wives, bring an Ethical Synthesis to bear that shall put Shakespeare and Hardy, Milton and Rabelais, into appropriate niches?

“Every critic has a right to his own Aesthetic Principles, to his own Ethical Convictions; but when it comes to applying these in tiresome, pedantic agitation, to Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Lamb, we must beg leave to cry off! What we want is not the formulating of new Critical Standards, and the dragging in of the great masters before our last miserable Theory of Art. What we want is an honest, downright and quite _personal_ articulation, as to how these great things in literature really hit us when they find us for the moment natural and off our guard—when they find us as men and women, and not as ethical gramophones....

“There is an absurd notion going about, among those half-educated people who frequent Ethical Platforms, that Literary Criticism must be ‘constructive.’ O that word ‘constructive’! How, in the name of the mystery of genius, can criticism be anything else than an idolatry, a worship, a metamorphosis, a love affair! The pathetic mistake these people make is to fancy that the great artists only lived and wrote in order to buttress up such poor wretches as they are upon the particular little, thin, cardboard platform which is at present their moral security and refuge.

“No one has a right to be a critic whose mind cannot, with Protean receptivity, take first one form and then another, as the great Spells, one by one, are thrown and withdrawn.

“Who wants to know what Professor So-and-So’s view of life may be? We want to use Professor So-and-so as a Mirror, as a Medium, as a Go-Between, as a Sensitive Plate, so that we may once more get the thrill of contact with this or that dead Spirit. He must keep his temperament, our Critic; his peculiar angle of receptivity, his capacity for personal reaction. But it is the reaction of his own natural nerves that we require, not the pallid, second-hand reaction of his tedious, formulated opinions. Why cannot he see that, as a natural man, physiologically, nervously, temperamentally, pathologically different from other men, he is an interesting spectacle, as he comes under the influence first of one great artist and then another, while as a silly, little, preaching school-master, he is only a blot upon the world-mirror!...

“It is because so many of us are so limited in our capacity for ‘variable reaction’ that there are so few good critics. But we are all, I think, more multiple-souled than we care to admit. It is our foolish pride of consistency, our absurd desire to be ‘constructive’ that makes us so dull. A critic need not necessarily approach the world from the ‘pluralistic’ angle; but there must be something of such ‘pluralism’ in his natural temper, or the writers he can respond to will be very few!

“Let it be plainly understood. It is impossible to respond to a great genius half way. It must be all or nothing. If you lack the courage, or the variability, to _go all the way_ with very different masters, and to let your constructive consistency take care of itself, you may become, perhaps, an admirable moralist; you will never be a Clairvoyant critic. All this having been admitted, it still remains that one has a right to draw out from the great writers one loves certain universal aesthetic tests, with which to discriminate between modern productions.

“But even such tests are personal and relative. They are not to be foisted on one’s readers as anything ‘ex cathedra’. One such test is the test of what has been called ‘the grand style’—that grand style against which, as Arnold says, the peculiar vulgarity of our race beats in vain! I do not suppose I shall be accused of perverting my devotion to the ‘grand style’ into an academic ‘narrow way,’ through which I would force every writer I approach. Some most winning and irresistible artists never come near it.

“And yet—what a thing it is! And with what relief do we return to it, after the ‘wallowings’ and ‘rhapsodies,’ the agitations and prostitutions, of those who have it not.

“And what are the elements, the qualities, that go to make up this ‘grand style’?

“Let me first approach the matter negatively. There are certain things that _cannot_—because of something essentially ephemeral in them—be dealt with in the grand style.

“Such are, for instance, our modern controversies about the problem of Sex. We may be Feminists or Anti-Feminists—what you will—and we may be able to throw interesting light on these complicated relations, but we cannot write of them, either in prose or poetry, in the grand style, because the whole discussion is ephemeral; because, with all its gravity, it is irrelevant to the things that ultimately matter!

“Such, to take another example, are our elaborate arguments about the interpretation, ethical or otherwise, of Christian Doctrine. We can be very entertaining, very moral, very eloquent, very subtle, in this particular sphere; but we cannot deal with it in the ‘great style,’ because the permanent issues that really count lie out of reach of such discussion and remain unaffected by it.

“Let me make myself quite clear. Hector and Andromache can talk to one another of their love, of their eternal parting, of their child, and they can do this in the great style; but if they fell into dispute over the particular sex conventions that existed in their age, they might be attractive still, but they would not be uttering words in the ‘great style’....

“The test is always that of Permanence, and of immemorial human association. It is, at bottom, nothing but human association that makes the great style what it is. Things that have, for centuries upon centuries, been associated with human pleasures, human sorrows, and the great recurrent dramatic moments of our lives, can be expressed in this style; and only such things. The great style is a sort of organic, self-evolving work of art, to which the innumerable units of the great human family have all put their hands. That is why so large a portion of what is written in the great style is anonymous—like Homer and much of the Bible and certain old ballads and songs. It is for this reason that Walter Pater is right when he says that the important thing in Religion is the Ceremony, the Litany, the Ritual, the Liturgical Chants, and not the Creeds or the Commandments, or discussion upon Creed or Commandment.... Why, of all the religious books in the world, have ‘the Psalms of David,’ whether in Hebrew or Latin or English, touched men’s souls and melted and consoled them? They are not philosophical. They are not logical. They are not argumentative. They are not moral. And yet they break our hearts with their beauty and appeal!

“It is the same with certain well-known _words_. Is it understood, for instance, why the word ‘Sword’ is always poetical and in ‘the grand style,’ while the word ‘Zeppelin’ or ‘Submarine’ or ‘Gatling gun’ or ‘Howitzer’ can only be introduced by Free Versifiers, who let the ‘grand style’ go to the Devil? The word ‘Sword,’ like the word ‘Plough,’ has gathered about it the human associations of innumerable centuries, and it is impossible to utter it without feeling something of their pressure and their strain. The very existence of the ‘grand style’ is a protest against any false views of ‘progress’ and ‘evolution.’ Man may alleviate his lot in a thousand directions; he may build up one Utopia after another; but the grand style will remain; will remain as the ultimate expression of those aspects of his life that _cannot change_—while he remains Man....

“There are a certain number of solitary spirits moving among us who have a way of troubling us by their aloofness from our controversies, our disputes, our arguments, our ‘great problems.’ We call them Epicures, Pagans, Heathen, Egoists, Hedonists, and Virtuosos. And yet not one of these words exactly fits them. What they are really doing is living in the atmosphere and the temper of ‘the grand style’—and that is why they are so irritating and so provocative! To them the most important thing in the world is to realize to the fullest limit of their consciousness what it means to be born a Man. The actual drama of our mortal existence, reduced to the simplest terms, is not enough to occupy their consciousness and their passion. In this sphere—in the sphere of the ‘inevitable things’ of human life—everything becomes to them a sacrament. Not a Symbol—be it noted—but a Sacrament! The food they eat; the wine they drink; their waking and sleeping; the hesitancies and reluctancies of their devotions; the swift anger of their recoils and retreats; their long loyalties; their savage reversions; their sudden ‘lashings out’; their hate and their love and their affection; the simplicities of these everlasting moods are in all of us—become, every one of them, matters of sacramental efficiency. To regard each day, as it dawns, as a ‘last day,’ and to make of its sunrise, of its noon, of its sun-setting, a rhythmic antiphony to the eternal gods—this is to live in the spirit of the ‘grand style.’ It has nothing to do with ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ Saints may practise it, and sometimes do. Sinners often practise it. The whole thing consists in growing vividly conscious of those moods and events which are permanent and human, as compared with those other moods and events which are transitory and unimportant.

“When a man or woman experiences desire, lust, hate, jealousy, devotion, admiration, passion, they are victims of the eternal forces, that can speak, if they will, in ‘the great style.’ When a man or woman ‘argues’ or ‘explains’ or ‘moralizes’ or ‘preaches,’ they are the victims of accidental dust-storms, which rise from futility and return to vanity. That is why Rhetoric, as Rhetoric, can never be in the great style. That is why certain great revolutionary Anarchists, those who have the genius to express in words their heroic defiance of ‘the something rotten in Denmark,’ move us more, and assume a grander outline, than the equally admirable, and possibly more practical, arguments of the Scientific Socialists. It is the eternal appeal we want, to what is basic and primitive and undying in our tempestuous human nature!

“The grand style announces and commands. It weeps and it pleads. It utters oracles and it wrestles with angels. It never apologizes; it never rationalizes; and it never explains. That is why the great ineffable passages in the supreme masters take us by the throat and strike us dumb. Deep calls unto Deep in them, and our heart listens and is silent. To ‘do good scientific thinking’ in the cause of humanity has its well-earned reward; but the gods ‘throw incense’ on a different temper. The ‘fine issues’ that reach them, in their remoteness and disdain, are the ‘fine issues’ of an antagonist worthy of their own swift wrath, their own swift vengeance, and their own swift love....

“Beauty! That is what we all, even the grossest of us, in our heart of hearts is seeking. Lust seeks it; Love creates it; the miracle of Faith finds it—but nothing less, neither truth nor wisdom nor morality nor knowledge, neither progress nor reaction, can quench the thirst we feel.”

_A Benefit Recital_

The sonata recital of Josephine Gerwing and Carol Robinson on March 7 is to be a benefit for THE LITTLE REVIEW. Our gratitude is so deep that we can’t even begin to express it. But you will not be so interested in our gratitude as in our taste: we know both these musicians and we know that whoever comes to them for _music_ will not go away empty. It will be beautiful. The program is on page 59. Tickets are on sale at 917 Fine Arts Building.

_More Nietzsche_

Dr. Foster’s series of Nietzsche articles will be continued in the next issue.

Ten Grotesques

ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE