Modernist Poetics of History: Pound, Eliot, and the Sense of the Past [Course Book ed.] 9781400858514

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction. Modernism and Historicism
Chapter One. Pater and Yeats: The Dicta of the Great Critics
Chapter Two. I Gather the Limbs of Osiris
Chapter Three. Canzoni: Toward a Poem Including History
Chapter Four. The Perigord Phantastikon
Chapter Five. Three Cantos and the War Against Philology
Chapter Six. Truth and Calliope
Chapter Seven. Eeldrop and Appleplex: Eliot and Pound
Chapter Eight. F. H. Bradley and the "System" of History
Chapter Nine. The Contrived Corridors of Poems 1920
Chapter Ten. The Waste Land: Beyond the Frontier
Notes
Index

Citation preview

Modernist Poetics of History

Modernist Poetics of History Pound, Eliot, and the Sense of the Past

By James Longenbach

Princeton University Press Princeton, New Jersey

Copyright © 1987 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Guildford, Surrey All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data will be found on the last printed page of this book ISBN 0-691-06707-4 Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Paul Mellon Fund of Princeton University Press This book has been composed in Bulmer Clothbound editions of Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. Paperbacks, although satisfactory for personal collections, are not usually suitable for library rebinding Printed in the United States of America by Princeton University Press Princeton, New Jersey

For my mother and father

Contents

Preface

IX

Acknowledgments

xiii

Abbreviations

xvii

Introduction

Modernism and Historicism

3

One Pater and Yeats: The Dicta of the Great Critics

29

Two I Gather the Limbs of Osiris

45

Three Canzoni: Toward a Poem Including History

62

Four The Perigord Phantastikon Five Six

Three Cantos and the War Against Philology Truth and Calliope

79 96 131

Seven Eeldrop and Appleplex: Eliot and Pound

152

Eight

F. H. Bradley and the "System" of History

164

Nine

The Contrived Corridors of Poems 1920

Ten The Waste Land: Beyond the Frontier

177 200

Notes

239

Index

267

Preface

In his most famous essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919), T. S. Eliot wrote that the poet requires an "historical sense" that "involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence" (SW, 49). These phrases have acquired great currency, but their sense remains obscure. What does it mean to write about the past as having both a "pastness" and a "presence"? And why is this kind of knowledge derived from the "historical sense"? It has long been apparent that the work of Eliot and Pound grows from an active interest in history. But while several generations of scholars have conducted a fruitful search for the sources of Pound's and Eliot's allusions, the question of the nature of their historicism itself has gone unanswered. What, we may ask, are the interpretive strategies by which Pound and Eliot include history in their poems? What is the status of historical knowledge in their works? What are the philosophical underpinnings of their conceptions of history? "Tradition and the Individual Talent," where Eliot presents the most codified formulation of the "historical sense," will not offer us much assistance in our efforts to answer these questions. Although it is the most famous of Eliot's essays, it is also the most opaque. It represents the programmatic culmination of the first phase of literary modernism, just as Ulysses, The Waste Land, una A Draft ofXVI Cantos are the artistic culmination of the movement. These works are all "poems including history" (to adopt the phrase Pound began to use in the 1930s to describe The Cantos), and to understand the modernist "historical sense," we must see how Eliot's statements in his essays were made possible by the early work of Pound, Joyce, and even Yeats. In one sense, then, my examination of the modernist poetics of history may be seen as a genealogy of the theory and practice of the "poem including history" from Pater and the early Yeats, through Pound's

χ

PREFACE

Canzoni (1911), "Near Perigord" (1915), and Three Cantos (1917), to Eliot's Poems (1920) and The Waste Land (1922). My construction of this genealogy has been motivated by a desire to locate Pound and Eliot in the central tradition of Romantic and postRomantic poetry. Pater and Yeats, to whom Pound looked consciously for "the dicta of the great critics," serve as the hinge that connects Pound and Eliot to their nineteenth-century precursors. Like Pater, Pound adopted what I shall call an "existential" historicism that led him to avoid the construction of large-scale patterns for history and focus on the problematic relationship of the interpreter and the past. This historicism remained the foundation of Pound's work from his earliest poetry and prose through the beginning of his work on The Cantos. As The Cantos progressed, however, Pound explored many other kinds of historicism in his effort to "include history" in the poem. Rather than tracing his more idiosyncratic explorations of his­ tory in the later cantos, I shift my focus to Eliot's work, beginning with the close reading of Pound and Bradley he undertook in the same years he began to publish his first poetry and criticism. My genealogy of the modern "poem including history" then culminates in The Waste Land, the poem that offers the richest expression of the modernist sense of the past. In tracing this genealogy, I have proceeded from an assumption ar­ ticulated by Sanford Schwartz in The Matrix ofModernism: "Modern­ ist poetics . . . is part of a major intellectual development that pro­ duced significant changes in philosophy, the arts, and other fields" of 1 twentieth-century thought. The historicism of Pound and Eliot did not arise in the sealed-off world of literary history; their work shows profound similarities to the work of historians and philosophers of history who helped to define the intellectual horizons of their age and our own: Nietzsche, Burckhardt, Dilthey, Croce, and Collingwood. In the later years of the nineteenth century, philosophers of history realized that if historical knowledge were to be saved from Nietzsche's style of skepticism, a rigorous examination of historical methodology was required. In 1868Johann Gustav Droysen wrote that "what we have to do is find methods, in order to secure objective rules and con­ trol for [the historian's] immediate and subjective grasp of

PREFACE

xi

events. . . . We need to ground, sound, and justify our subjective knowledge."2 In his lifelong effort to write what he thought of as a "critique of historical reason" that is precisely the task that Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) undertook. Today, historians and literary critics are still coming to terms with his work. "We may question [Dilthey's] style," writes Geoffrey Hartman in an essay occasioned by the 100th anniversary of the Modern Language Association, "but the dilemma he expresses, and struggles to resolve, remains ours." 3 Dilthey's "dilemma" is as useful for understanding modernist poetry and criticism as it is for coming to terms with our own. Like Dilthey, Pound and Eliot spent a good portion of their lives investigating the intricacies of interpretation, but they also recorded their conclusions in their poems. Neither of these poets knew Dilthey's work. In my effort to set Pound and Eliot in the context of modern historical thought, I will point out the direct influence of some thinkers (Burckhardt on Pound, Bradley on Eliot), but I will also establish other continuities (Croce and Pound, Dilthey and Eliot) that are not supported by any evidence of direct influence. My goal is not only to address the problems of influence but to create a picture of the intellectual background that made a poem such as The Waste Land possible. At the same time, I have tried to point out the distinctive qualities of both Pound's and Eliot's work. Although Pound's early poetry and criticism exerted an important influence on Eliot, and although both poets participated in the major cultural and intellectual trends of their time, each of them was profoundly idiosyncratic. While Pound discovered support for his historical sense in Yeats's occult theories of the "Great Memory," Eliot looked to nineteenth-century French "traditionalist" theology. My emphasis on their interest in these transcendental philosophies shows how their formulations of the historical sense grew from far more unconventional points of departure than Burckhardt or Bradley; but it is also motivated by my desire to situate Pound and Eliot in the mainstream of Romantic poetry. Their poems including history, like Milton's or Wordsworth's, are visionary quests into their personal and cultural heritage. As my work on Pound and Eliot progressed, I came to define the

XIl

PREFACE

scope of my study with the help of a peculiar sentence from the final paragraph of "Tradition and the Individual Talent." Like most of the masterpieces of literary modernism, this essay is written in a language designed to be understood by an initiated few; it explains the importance but not the nature of the "historical sense." Eliot himself recognized this when he wrote at the end of "Tradition and the Individual Talent" that the "essay proposes to halt at the frontier of metaphysics or mysticism" (SW, 59). "Tradition and the Individual Talent" may halt there, but the philosophical foundations of the essay do not. The "historical sense" is essential to Eliot's work, and essential to an understanding of that sense is a "metaphysics or mysticism" that lurks behind the cautious language of psychology and science. My effort has been directed toward crossing that frontier.

Acknowledgments

Pound wrote in Canto 13, paraphrasing Confucius, And even I can remember A day when the historians left blanks in their writings I mean for things they didn't know. (13/60) There are fewer gaps in the history I have narrated than there otherwise would be because I have had the pleasure of relying on people who know more than I do. First among many is A. Walton Litz, who supported this project from its beginnings with a spirited generosity and kindness. Ronald Bush, Samuel Hynes, Hugh Kenner, Thomas Reed, and Sanford Schwartz each offered invaluable criticism and encouragement. My colleagues and teachers at the University of Rochester, Princeton University, and Trinity College (Hartford) challenged me to write a better book and offered the friendship and support that made the task possible. At Princeton University Press Marjorie Sherwood and Robert Brown helped the book to reach its final form. I am especially grateful to Stephen Myers for his help with the index and proofs. And from beginning to end, my greatest debt has been to Joanna Scott, who gave to my work the same devotion and intensity she brings to her own. Parts of this book have been previously published in "Guarding the Horned Gates: History and Interpretation in the Early Poetry of T. S. Eliot," ELH 52 (Summer 1985) and "Ezra Pound's Canzoni: Toward a Poem Including History," Paideuma 13 (Winter 1984). Excerpts from the following works by T. S. Eliot are reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. and Faber and Faber, Ltd.: Collected Poems 1909-1962, copyright 1936 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., copyright © 1963,1964 by T. S. Eliot; The Confi-

xiv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

dential Clerk, copyright 1954 by T. S. Eliot, renewed 1982 by Esme Valerie Eliot; Selected Essays, copyright 1950 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., renewed 1978 by Esme Valerie Eliot; The Waste Land: A Facsimile, ed. Valerie Eliot, copyright © 1971 by Valerie Eliot. Excerpts from the following works by T. S. Eliot are reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc. and Faber and Faber, Ltd.: Knowhdge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley, copyright © 1964 by T. S. Eliot; On Poetry and Poets, copyright © 1943, 1945, 1951, 1954, 1956, 1957 by T. S. Eliot; To Criticize the Critic, copyright © 1965 by Valerie Eliot. Excerpts from The Sacred Wood by T. S. Eliot, copyright 1928, are reprinted by permission of Methuen and Company, Ltd. Excerpts from The Use ofPoetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry in England by T. S. Eliot, copyright 1933, are reprinted by permission of Harvard University Press and Faber and Faber, Ltd. Selections from T. S. Eliot's uncollected writings are reprinted by permission of Mrs. Valerie Eliot and Faber and Faber, Ltd., from sources as indicated in T. S. Eliot, A Bibliography, by Donald Gallup (Revised Edition, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., New York, and Faber and Faber Ltd., London, 1969). Excerpts from the following works by Ezra Pound are reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation and Faber and Faber, Ltd.: The Cantos ofEzra Pound, copyright © 1934,1948,1962 by Ezra Pound; The Collected Early Poems ofEzra Pound, copyright © 1976 by the Trustees of the Ezra Pound Literary Property Trust, all rights reserved; Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shahspear: Their Letters, 1909-1914, copyright © 1984 by the Trustees of the Ezra Pound Literary Property Trust; Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir, copyright © 1970 by Ezra Pound, all rights reserved; Pavannes and Divagations, copyright © 1958 by Ezra Pound; Personae: The Collected Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound, copyright 1926 by Ezra Pound; Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce, copyright © 1967 by Ezra Pound; The Selected Letters ofEzra Pound, copyright 1950 by Ezra Pound; Selected Prose 1909-1965, copyright © 1973 by the Estate of Ezra Pound; Translations, copyright © 1954, 1963 by Ezra Pound, all rights re-

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

xv

served; lines from Pound's drafts for the Ur-Cantos and selections from Pound's uncollected writings, copyright © 1987 by the Trustees of the Ezra Pound Literary Trust. Excerpts from the following works by Ezra Pound are reprinted by the permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation and Peter Owen, Ltd.: Guide to Kulchur, copyright © 1970 by Ezra Pound, all rights reserved; The Spirit of Romance, copyright © 1968 by Ezra Pound, all rights reserved. Lines from "The People" by W. B. Yeats are reprinted by permission of Michael B. Yeats, Macmillan, London, Ltd., and Macmillan Publishing Company from The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Teats, ed. Peter AlIt and Russell K. Alspach, copyright 1919 by Macmillan Publishing Company, renewed 1947 by Bertha Georgie Yeats. Lines from "The Secret Rose" by W. B. Yeats are reprinted by permission of Michael B. Yeats and Macmillan, London, Ltd. from The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Teats (London: Macmillan, 1957).

Abbreviations

Works by T. S. Eliot: ASG

After Strange Gods: A Primer ofModern Heresy. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1934.

CPP

The Complete Poems and Phys of T. S. Eliot 1909-1950. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1962.

KE

Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy ofF. H. Bradley. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1964.

OPP

On Poetry and Poets. New York: Noonday-Farrar, 1969.

SE SW

Selected Essays. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1960. The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. 1920; rpt. New York: University Paperbacks, Barnes 8c Noble, 1966.

TCC

To Criticize the Critic and Other Writings. London: Faber & Faber, 1965.

UPUC

The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry in England. 1933; rpt. London: Faber & Faber, 1964.

WLF

The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the OriginalDrafts Including the Annotations ofEzra Pound. Edited with an introduction by Valerie Eliot. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1971.

Works by Ezra Pound: CEP

The Collected Early Poems of Ezra Pound. Edited by Michael John King with an introduction by Louis L. Martz. New York: New Directions, 1976.

XVlIl

ABBREVIATIONS

GB

Gaudier-BrzesL·: A Memoir. New York: New Directions, 1970.

GK

Guide to Kulchur. New York: New Directions, 1968.

L

The Selected ^ters of Ezra Pound 1907-1941. Edited by D. D. Paige. New York: New Directions, 1971.

LE

Literary Essays ofEzra Pound. Edited by T. S. Eliot. New York: New Directions, 1968.

P

Personae: The Collected Shorter Poems ofEzra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1971.

PD

Pavannes and Divagations. New York: New Directions, 1958.

PJ

Pound/Joyce: The Letters ofEzra Pound to James Joyce with Pound's Critical Essays and Articles about Joyce. Edited with commentary by Forrest Read. New York: New Directions, 1967.

PSL

Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shakespear: Their Letters 19091914. Edited by Omar Pound and A. Walton Litz. New York: New Directions, 1984.

SP

Selected Prose 1909-1965. Edited by William Cookson. New York: New Directions, 1973.

SR

The Spirit of Romance. 1910; rpt. New York: New Directions, 1952.

T

Ezra Pound: Trandations. With an introduction by Hugh Kenner. New York: New Directions, 1963.

References to The Cantos ofEzra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1975) will be given in the text as (81/521) to designate Canto 81, page 521.

Modernist Poetics of History

Introduction

Modernism and Historicism

In the same year that T. S. Eliot published "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919), the essay in which he declared that the "historical sense" is "indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year" (SW, 49), he wrote "Gerontion," a poem that has become a talisman for the idea of history in modern literature: History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions, Guides us by vanities. Think now She gives when our attention is distracted And what she gives, gives With such supple confusions That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late What's not believed in, or if still believed, In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon Into weak hands, what's thought can be dispensed with Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes. These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree. (CPP, 22) It is not generally known that this passage underwent a radical revision in the final stages of its composition. That revision consisted of the change of a single word.1 The passage originally opened, Nature has many cunning passages, contrived corridors And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions, Guides us by vanities. Sometime late in 1919 Eliot decided that the word bothering him was not nature but history. His revision of "Gerontion" is a worthy met-

4

INTRODUCTION

aphor for the much debated transition from Romanticism to modernism, and it points to the issues that are central to the philosophical foundations of modernism itself. That the nineteenth century witnessed the birth of an overpowering historical sense is a tenet of intellectual history so familiar that it hardly bears reiteration (though as several intellectual historians have pointed out, it does require reexamination).2 When John Stuart Mill published The Spirit of the Age in 1831, he was aware of both the novelty and the popularity of the study of history: The "spirit of the age" is in some measure a novel expression. I do not believe that it is to be met with in any work exceeding fifty years in antiquity. The idea of comparing one's own age with former ages, or with our notion of those which are yet to come, had occurred to philosophers; but it never before was itself the dominant idea of any age.3 By the 1880s what is today a commonplace about the transition from Romantic to Victorian poetry (that the Romantics found their inspiration in the natural world while the Victorians looked to the past) was already evident to readers sensitive to the spirit of their age. In Urbana Scripta (1885), an appreciation of Victorian poetry admired by Ezra Pound, Arthur Galton wrote that "we cannot say that Wordsworth interpreted any age except his own." Shelley, on the other hand, gave something to our poetry which no English poet had given before: the power of looking out of his own age, and of reaching the standpoint of another. . . . It is this power which we may call the new phase in poetry, and it is shown especially in three of our living poets: in Lord Tennyson, in Mr. Browning, in Mr. Matthew Arnold.4 We may no longer believe that the rise of the historical consciousness in the nineteenth century was such an abrupt departure from preceding centuries; nevertheless, the fact that many nineteenth-century thinkers examined their interest in history historically, asserting the novelty of their work, remains a powerful indication of the intellectual current of their time. William Morris's comment in "The Re-

MODERNISM AND HISTORICISM

5

vival of Architecture" that "the gift of the historical sense may be said to be a special gift of the nineteenth century"5 is only slightly less remarkable, coming in the 1880s, than the fact that there was something called the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings to hear it: the study of history had reached epidemic proportions. Near the close of the nineteenth century, it was difficult not to sense a "new phase in poetry" in Browning's The Ring and the Book (1869) or Arnold's "On the Modern Element in Literature" (1857). The preoccupation with the past evident in The Cantos, Pound's "poem including history," or in Eliot's The Waste Land, points out an important continuity between these poems and the major works of Browning and Arnold; The Cantos and The Waste Land are in some ways the ultimate illustration of the "critical spirit" which Arnold defined in "On the Modern Element in Literature" as the sense that "everywhere there is connexion, everywhere there is illustration: no single event, no single literature, is adequately comprehended except in its relation to other events, to other literatures."6 But there are also differences between Arnold and Eliot or Browning and Pound that prevent us from perceiving the modernists' preoccupation with the past as a simple elaboration of their Victorian inheritance. In the nineteenth century, most of the great conceptions of history were based on models of linear change. Hegel, Marx, Comte, and Spencer would have agreed on little save their belief that history is the story of man's development in time. In The Victorian Critic and the Idea of History Peter Allan Dale asserts that "regardless of the philosophical basis from which the nineteenth-century thinker approached history for the key to knowledge, he was likely to find in history a logical pattern or law and an overall goal that gave it some gratifying intelligibility."7 In the nineteenth century that "logical pattern or law" was usually based on a model of historical progress, but it could as easily have been based en a model of historical decline. Decline is only the reversal of progress, and both ideas require the same presupposition about the nature of historical change and the status of historical inquiry: the belief that historical events "as they were" may be observed and categorized according to predetermined laws. R. G. Collingwood writes

6

INTRODUCTION

in his The Idea of History (1946) that "in history . . . every decline is also a rise, and it is only the historian's personal failures of knowledge and sympathy. . . that prevent him from seeing this double character, at once creative and destructive, of any historical process whatever."8 The idea of decline is not an answer to the nineteenth-century idea of progress, and it would be wrong to see the thrust of twentieth-century historiography in expressions of historical decline. Despite the power that Spengler's Decline of the West (1919) and Toynbee's Study ofHistory (1934-1961) held over the popular imagination at the time of their publication, the historical sense articulated by Eliot and Pound would have required them to reject these historians' positivistic assumptions about historical knowledge. The work of Spengler and Toynbee, in fact, is very much a recapitulation of nineteenth-century "scientific" historiography; their contemporaries considered their books old-fashioned and naive.9 What is truly different about many twentieth-century historians' ideas about history is their rejection of the presuppositions about the nature of historical knowledge that make the construction of any sort of teleological or even linear history possible. Nietzsche wrote in his The Use and Abuse of History (1874) that "history is the work of the dramatist: to think one thing with another, and weave the elements into a single whole, with the presumption that the unity of plan must be put into the objects if it is not already there."10 After Nietzsche's critique of positivistic historiography, it became difficult to find the "truth" of history in the scientific patterning of events. As Hayden White has remarked, Nietzsche liberated the historian "from having to say anything about the past; the past is only an occasion for his invention of ingenious 'melodies.' " u The most persuasive study of the relationship of Nietzschean antihistoricism and modern literature has been made by Paul de Man in "Literary History and Literary Modernity," the penultimate chapter of Blindness and Insight.12 Focusing on Nietzsche's The Use and Abuse ofHistory, de Man sets out to show that among "the various antonyms that come to mind as possible opposites for 'modernity'—a variety which is itself symptomatic of the complexity of the term—none is more fruitful than 'history.' " He goes on to characterize modernity

MODERNISM AND HISTORICISM

7

not as an historical period, but as an antihistorical state of mind, "a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching at last a point that could be called a true present, a point of origin that marks a new departure." Turning against his own argument, de Man then points out that it "becomes impossible to overcome history . . . in the name of modernity, because both are linked by a temporal chain that gives them a common destiny."13 Modernity emerges as a self-destroying attitude because any rejection of the past turns out to be a repetition of a rejection that has always already been made. The power of de Man's arguments always emerges from his ability to use a small textual example as a synecdoche for a large theoretical problem. In "Literary History and Literary Modernity" this technique is also a serious limitation. Although nearly a hundred years separate Nietzsche's The Use and Abuse of History from de Man's Blindness and Insight, de Man is still engaged in an essentially Nietzschean, antihistorical critique of the idea of history: "what we call literary interpretation . . . is in fact literary history. If we extend this notion beyond literature, it merely confirms that the bases for historical knowledge are not empirical facts but written texts, even if these texts masquerade in the guise of wars or revolutions."14 This conception of historical knowledge has its roots in Nietzsche, and if de Man had employed a different philosopher of history for both his example and his methodology, his presentation of the relationship of modernism and historicism would have taken a different shape. Nietzschean antihistoricism, which claims that our interest in the past is unhealthy, the assumptions underlying our interest unsound, came near the close of a century that propagated the large-scale development of the historical sense. "For by excess of history," wrote Nietzsche, "life becomes maimed and degenerate, and is followed by the degeneration of history as well."15 Nietzschean antihistoricism remains a powerful ideology, and its repercussions may be found in Ibsen's Hedda Gabler (1890), Morris's Mews from Nowhere (1890), Mann's Buddenbrooks (1901), Gide's The Immoralist (1902), and Joyce's "The Dead" (1907). In all these works, history is felt to be a burden, something to be avoided or destroyed.16 Yet at the same time, the persistent effect of the past is finally unavoidable in each of these

8

INTRODUCTION

works. The poignancy of Joyce's story radiates from the realization that the dead are living still: at the conclusion of "The Dead" Gabriel realizes that he "had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling."17 This recognition of the presence of the ghosts of the past makes life in the present more sweet. Nietzsche himself realized that the eradication of the historical sense was not necessarily possible or valuable for modern man: a vision of history "that merely destroys without any impulse to construct will in the long run make its instruments tired of life."18 Antihistoricism is only one of several attitudes toward history that are bound up in modernism, and to understand the work of Eliot and Pound, equal time must be given to other ways of interpreting our relationship to the past. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in fact, were a time of aggressive debate about the nature of historical knowledge. In a survey of historical thought from 1890 to 1914, Richard Langhorne comments that the "period is characterized by the appearance of an historiography which would now be recognized as familiar and valid, and by the prosecution of a vigorous debate on the nature of history itself."19 By the end of the nineteenth century, many intellectuals had come to see history as the first cause behind almost every other branch of human thought; even the enormous prestige of the sciences was undermined by a new emphasis on their historicity. What we now refer to as the late nineteenth-century "crisis of historicism" was itself generated by the rapidly proliferating ways of interpreting history: how could the past "as it was" have any meaning when each person interpreted it differently?20 In England historians remained relatively uninterested in the philosophical speculation about the nature of history that ravaged the German historical school, and consequently late nineteenth-century British historians remained unaffected by this crisis of historicism. The experience of the First World War gave a more concrete reality to what had previously been purely theoretical problems, however; and

MODERNISM AND HISTORICISM

9

during the war many British intellectuals began a passionate investigation of the nature of historical knowledge. One month after Britain entered the war, Wyndham Lewis wrote that the "nations allied against Germany are in reality opposing the interference of the past. Europe to-day dislikes history. It is not one of her subjects. The past is a murderous drug whose use should be forbidden and is being vetoed now." Lewis emphasized that "we have got clean out ofhistory. We are not to-day living in history."21 After spending a few weeks in the trenches, Ford Madox Hueffer (Ford) was also temporarily transformed into an historical pessimist: If, before the war, one had any function it was that of historian. Basing, as it were, one's mortality on the Europe of Charlemagne as modified by the Europe of Napoleon. I once had something to go upon. One could approach with composure the Lex Allemannica, the Feudal System, problems of Aerial Flight, or the price of wheat or the relations of the sexes. But now, it seems to me, we have no method of approach to any of these problems.22 For Ford and his contemporaries, the war seemed to create a huge barrier between the past and the present, blasting centuries of history from beneath Edwardian England. But for Ford, this feeling did not make the writing of history impossible—more difficult, perhaps, but above all more necessary. He began his great tetralogy of novels, later collected as Parade's End, with the idea of reestablishing the novelist in his "proud position as historian of his own time."23 In Parade's End Ford tells the story of Tietjens, who loses his memory in the trenches and is forced to rediscover a new life and a new history in postwar England. It is a story neither of progress nor of decline, but the story of how one man learns that even after a catastrophe, the past lives on, transformed into the strange yet tangible reality of the present. Although Ford's novels do not articulate a formal theory of history, they do embody a kind of historicism that is opposed to Nietzsche's and equally as powerful. In the decades that surround the turn of the century, this "existential" historicism found its greatest expression in the work of Wilhelm Dilthey, and its repercussions may be found in such twentieth-century philosophers of history as Croce, Colling-

10

INTRODUCTION

wood, Ortega y Gasset, and Gadamer. Rather than seeing history as a deadening influence on the present, these thinkers emphasize that history is a living part of the present that cannot be destroyed; to live, for the existential historian, is to live historically. Responding to the increasing popularity of Nietzschean antihistoricism, Dilthey wrote in 1898 that the "voices are growing loud which complain bitterly about the heavy burden of the past which we carry with us. It is recommended that once and for all we throw off this burden and lighten the load with which we enter the new century." Dilthey objected to Nietzsche's glorification of a "naive consciousness" which lives without knowledge of the past: What the human spirit is can be revealed only by the historical consciousness of that which the mind has lived through and brought forth. . . . What man is only history can say. If the mind chooses to lighten its load by casting off history, then it forfeits its means of living and working. The rejection of historical inquiry is tantamount to foreswearing knowledge of man himself—it is the regression of knowledge back to a merely genial and fragmentary subjectivity.24 Neither Ford Madox Ford, a novelist, nor the poet-critics Pound and Eliot were professional historians, and they did not pursue the problem of historical knowledge with the same kind of interest that propelled Dilthey's work. Their poems and essays are nevertheless historical in a number of ways, and it is especially illuminating to read their work in the context of modern historicism. In addition to being many other things, poems are statements about our place in the world, and like every other act of communication, they are historical. "To be historical," writes Hans-Georg Gadamer, "means that one is not absorbed into self-knowledge."25 For Gadamer, interpretation is a necessary part of our interaction with any object in the world, since we are separated from those objects by time and space; understanding is made possible because we are not completely separate entities, but are joined by the continuities of the traditions of our languages and cultures. In this sense, writing a poem is as historical an act as playing Chopin or falling in love. "If it is by historical thinking that we re-

MODERNISM AND HISTORICISM

11

think and so rediscover the thought of Hammurabi or Solon," writes R. G. Collingwood, "it is in the same way that we discover the thought of a friend who writes us a letter, or a stranger who crosses the street."26 The poems of Eliot and Pound are historical in still another sense. Far from being antihistorical, these modern writers were consciously preoccupied with drawing many representations of the past into their work. For both these poets the present is nothing more than the sum of the entire past—a palimpsest, a complex tissue of historical remnants. "Within the time of a brief generation," wrote Eliot in 1919, "it has become evident that some smattering of anthropology is as essential to culture as Rollin's Universal History."27 Writing on Pound's earliest Cantos, Eliot remarked that a "large part of the poet's 'inspiration' must come from . . . his knowledge of history."28 Both Pound and Eliot found their "inspiration" in history, and each poet wrote a great deal of criticism about the nature of historical knowledge and interpretation. Pound and Eliot participated in the crisis of historicism that wrenched nearly every discipline of human thought during their lifetimes. And like many of the historians and philosophers of history who were their contemporaries, they felt that a healthy relationship with the past is essential for the highest quality of life and literature in the present. Even Nietzsche, as I have said, did not advocate a categorical rejection of history; he disparaged an interest in the past that prevented human beings from living a life of action in the present. It became the burden of the more sensitive of Nietzsche's heirs to forge a life-enhancing attitude toward the past. In The Sense of the Past (1917), Henry James's unfinished posthumous novel, Ralph Pendrel faces precisely this problem. Pendrel has found great success as an historian; he writes An Essay in Aid ofReading History and inherits an ancient London townhouse from a distant relative. At the same time, Pendrel is failing miserably as a lover. Rejected by his beloved, he sails to England to take possession of his house and soothe his disappointed passions with the mysteries of the past. Pendrel's problem, of course, is that his interest in the past keeps him from living a life of passion in the present. Once settled in the house, his identification

12

INTRODUCTION

with the past becomes so strong that he sees his own face on an ancient portrait and believes that he and his ancestor have exchanged personalities: "It wasn't for Ralph as if he had lost himself, as he might have done in a deeper abyss, but much rather as if in respect to what he most cared for he had never found himself till now. As the house was his house, so the time, as it sank into him, was his time."29 Pendrel's dilemma was the dilemma faced by the aging Henry James. It was also the dilemma faced by James's fellow expatriates, Eliot and Pound. Eliot considered The Sense of the Past to be the finest expression of James's "historical sense," but when he compared James with Hawthorne, he noted that "in Hawthorne this sense exercised itself in a grip on the past itself; in James it is a sense of the sense."30 Pound and Eliot had this sense of the sense: they were occupied not only with the actual recollection of the past but with the process and methodology of that recollection. Their work forced them to think strenuously about the ontological status of history and the nature of historical understanding. The heart of Anglo-American literary modernism may be found in Pound's and Eliot's attempts to negotiate between several conflicting types of historicism, and discover a vitalizing attitude toward history. They needed to succeed where Ralph Pendrel had failed. The Vorticist movement in prewar London presents a striking example of this paradigm. While Wyndham Lewis advocated a bold rejection of the past, Pound was not so sure. He expressed his ambivalence in a 1914 essay on Lewis: At no time in the world has great art been exactly like the great art of any other time. A belief that great art will always be like the art of 1850 is "Pastism," a belief that great art will always be like the art of 1911 is "futurism." One hopes that one is not afflicted by either of these diseases.31 Pound is attempting to navigate between the Scylla of the antihistoricism of Marinetti and the Italian futurists and the Charybdis of the "pastism" of the philologists who nurtured Pound's interest in mediaeval literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Twenty-five years later, with Ulysses, The Waste Land, and half of The Cantos to look back

MODERNISM AND HISTORICISM

13

on, Pound could make a more definitive statement about the nature of his historical sense in his Guide to Kukhur: "We do NOT know the past in chronological sequence. It may be convenient to lay it out anesthetized on the table with dates pasted on here and there, but what we know we know by ripples and spirals eddying out from us and from our time" (GK, 60). In the early years of the modernist movement, Pound was pushing toward this understanding of history in which past and present are indistinguishably mingled. But in attempting to achieve his via media he sometimes collided with the rocks or slipped into the whirlpool; his sixth book of poems, Canzoni (1911), is organized around a chronological schema that bends under the pressure of Pound's growing sense that all ages are in some way contemporaneous. Eliot repeats the tension that Pound felt between "pastism" and "futurism" in the very title of "Tradition and the Individual Talent." Although Eliot urged the poet to achieve an easy commerce between the history of events in the past and the history of the poet's own mind in the present, his own work grew from the tension he felt between these two histories. Despite Eliot's persuasive rhetoric, it is not so easy to dispense with the tensions between the "timeless" and the "temporal," between tradition conceived as an "ideal order" of time-honored monuments, and the individual talent conceived as a mind that alters the past "as much as the present is directed by the past" (SW, 50). When the historical sense professed by Eliot and Pound resists the pressure of competing ideas about history and steers its own course, it takes the form of what I have called, following Fredric Jameson, an existential historicism. Pound and Eliot join such philosophers as Dilthey, Croce, and Collingwood in believing that historicism, in the words of Jameson, does not involve the construction of this or that linear or evolutionary or genetic history, but rather designates something like a transhistorical event: the experience, rather, by which historicity as such is manifested, by means of the contact between the historian's mind in the present and a given synchronic cultural complex from the past.32

14

INTRODUCTION

For the existential historian, history does not exist as a sequence of events that occurred in the past; rather, it is a function of the historian's effort to understand the past in the present—what Jameson calls "the experience . . . by which historicity as such is manifested." Johann Gustav Droysen, one of the forerunners of modern historicism, wrote in his Outline of the Principles ofHistory (1868) that the "facts" of history do not "speak for themselves, alone, exclusively, 'objectively.' Without the narrator to make them speak, they would be dumb. It is not objectivity that is the historian's best glory. His justness consists in seeking to understand."33 This statement prefigured the direction that historical thought would take for the next hundred years: once the positivists' vision of a scientific historian who objectively assesses and categorizes his facts was found to mask the complications of historical understanding, the historian's attention shifted to the psychological intricacies of understanding itself. Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) would devote his entire life to an investigation of historical understanding. While Kant had established the categories that govern the ways we acquire scientific knowledge in his Critique ofPure Reason, Dilthey saw the need for a Critique ofHistorical Reason, which would establish, against "the constant irruption of romantic whim and sceptical subjectivity," the categories of historical knowledge that would provide a foundation for "valid interpretation on which all certainty in history rests."34 Dilthey did not believe that the relativity of interpretation undermined historical knowledge; on the contrary, he asserted that "the first condition for the possibility of the study of history lies in this: that I myself am an historical being, that the man who studies history is the man who makes history."35 For Dilthey, history is not produced from a collection of facts but is manifested by the historicity of the very experience of investigating the past. In his effort to build an alternative to the positivistic historian's goal of scientific objectivity, Dilthey maintained that history is not a science but a separate discipline requiring its own theories and methodologies. He distinguished the Naturwissenschaften or natural sciences from the Geisteswissenschaften, which literally means the "sciences of the spirit" or the "sciences of the mind" but is probably

MODERNISM AND HISTORICISM

15

best translated as the "human studies."36 History is one of the "human studies" because the historian's material (unlike the scientist's) is not made up of facts, analyzed empirically, but of spirit, understood intuitively. According to Dilthey, the historian "penetrates the observable facts of human history to reach what is not accessible to the senses."37 He rejected the scientific historian's inclination to categorize historical events in large, sweeping patterns: "We despise construction and love concrete investigation, remaining skeptical toward the machinery of a system."38 Having forsaken this schematic approach to history, however, Dilthey required some new organizing principle to link together the individual moments he resurrected from the past. "Existential historicism," writes Jameson, "requires some principle of unity in order to prevent its vision from collapsing into the sheer mechanical and meaningless succession of facts of empiricist historiography."39 Dilthey found a new organizing principle in the focal point of what he called the Geisteswissenschaflen—Geist itself, the world of spirit: Everything is relative, the only thing which is absolute is the nature of spirit itself which manifests itself in all these things. And for a knowledge of the nature of spirit there is no terminus, nofinalapprehension, each is relative, each has been sufficient if it has sufficed for its time.40 Each age participates in this transcendental "spirit" (Geist could also be translated as "mind" or "intellect") but each age has its own distinctive "objectifications of spirit"—the social, political, or artistic manifestations of "spirit" particular to the time. Despite this emphasis on "spirit" as the focal point of historical inquiry, Dilthey did not advocate a return to the Hegelian conception of history as (in Dilthey's words) a "universal reason which expresses the essence of world-spirit." For Dilthey, "spirit" is inseparable from its "objectifications": "Today we must start from the reality of life. . . . Hegel constructed metaphysically; we analyze the given."41 Dilthey wanted to de-idealize the Romantic conception of "spirit" into "life." In his use of the word, "life" is not merely what an individual experiences, but a deeper reality made up of "actual externally-con-

16

INTRODUCTION

ditioned interactions between people, considered independent of particular changes in time and location." "Life" lies at the base of all individuality, a common ground that makes understanding between individuals possible. It is "the interweaving of all mankind." And it is the historian's job to "get behind its scientific elaboration and grasp life in its raw state."42 What Dilthey called "lived experience" (Erkbnis) makes this kind of deep communication possible. When an individual experiences something in its totality, the relationship ceases to be one of subject and object; the act of experiencing and the experience itself become one, and the individual is unified with "life" itself. In order to understand the past, consequently, the historian must breathe his own life into the past, resurrecting the "lived experience" of a particular moment in the past through his powers of empathy and intuition. For Dilthey, historical understanding is "a rediscovery of the I in the thou"; it teaches us not only about the past but about ourselves: "we cannot understand ourselves and others except by projecting what we have actually experienced into every expression of our own and others' lives."43 Croce expressed the same thoughts more extravagantly: "Do you wish to understand the true history of a Ligurian or Sicilian neolithic man? First of all, try if it be possible to make yourself mentally into a Ligurian or Sicilian neolithic man."44 By understanding the neolithic Ligurian, we come to understand ourselves. This faith in the individual's ability to transcend his own historical limitations seems almost outrageous by today's standards. Rather than seeing the impossibility of a pure knowledge of the past as a barrier to any kind of historical knowledge, however, the existential historian sees it as the necessary condition in which understanding takes place. The Pound of Three Cantos and the Eliot of The Waste Land would agree. Jameson points out that the existential historian does not believe that "the past itself remains unmodified" by the process of inquiry. Since the historian's job is to breathe the life of the present into the past, the past and present are consequently mingled into one unified whole: The historicist act revives the dead and reenacts the essential mystery of the cultural past which, like Tiresias drinking the blood, is

MODERNISM AND HISTORICISM

17

momentarily returned to life and warmth and allowed once more to speak its mortal speech and to deliver its long forgotten message in surroundings unfamiliar to it.45 Here, in explaining the methodology of existential historicism, Jameson refers to the eleventh book of the Odyssey, where Odysseus pours the sacrificial blood into the ground so that he may revive the ghost of Tiresias and discover the secrets of the past and future. This passage was a touchstone for Dilthey himself: he wrote that "historical vision . . . enables us to give new life to the bloodless shadows of the past."46 Ezra Pound adapts this same passage from Divus's Renaissance Latin translation of the Odyssey in the final version of Canto 1: Poured we libations unto each the dead, First mead and then sweet wine, water mixed with white flour. Then prayed I many a prayer to the sickly death's-heads; As set in Ithaca, sterile bulls of the best For sacrifice, heaping the pyre with goods, A sheep to Tiresias only, black and a bell-sheep. Dark blood flowed in the fosse, Souls out of Erebus, cadaverous dead, of brides Of youths and of the old who had borne much; Souls stained with recent tears, girls tender, Men many, mauled with bronze lance heads, Battle spoil, bearing yet dreory arms, These many crowded about me; with shouting, Pallor upon me, cried to my men for more beasts; Slaughtered the herds, sheep slain of bronze; Poured ointment, cried to the gods, To Pluto the strong, and praised Proserpine; Unsheathed the narrow sword, I sat to keep off the impetuous impotent dead, Till I should hear Tiresias. (1/3-4) Just as Odysseus gives life to ghosts, Pound gives his own life to a dead poet, translating Divus's translation of Homer into English and filtering the result through the ancient rhythms of "The Seafarer." Near the end of this canto, a new voice enters, and we hear Pound say, "Lie

18

INTRODUCTION

quiet Divus," as he lays to rest the ghost he has blooded with his words. Pound's poem including history begins with an invocation of the dead, a seance that reveals how historical knowledge is acquired by infusing the ghosts of the past with the life of the present. Like DiIthey, Pound understands the past through the process of imaginative reconstruction. It took Pound eight years to settle on this Homeric passage as the opening of The Cantos. In the first version of Canto 1 (1917) he explained rather than illustrated his historicism: "Ghosts move about me / patched with histories," he wrote, describing the spirits of the living past that hover over the sapphire waters of Lake Garda.47 Jameson remarks that the existential historian has a "visionary instinct for all the forms of living praxis preserved and still intact within the monuments of the past."48 This "visionary instinct" is especially apparent in the work of Dilthey, Croce, and Collingwood, where "spirit," "imagination," and "intuition" are privileged terms in their philosophies of history. In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, historians began to borrow the tools of the artist and discard the tools of the scientist in their attempts to recapture the past. With the sensibility of poetry already a natural part of their projects, Pound's and Eliot's investigations of history reveal an even stronger "visionary instinct" than the work of the historians who were their contemporaries. For these historical poets, understanding becomes a mystical project, and it is not accidental that the vocabulary of spiritualism is suited to their sense of the past. In his idiosyncratic Time and Western Man (1928) Wyndham Lewis offers one of the best summaries of the visionary historical sense that is central to the modernist poetics of Eliot and Pound. "The production of a work of art," writes Lewis, is strictly the work of a visionary. Indeed, this seems so evident that it scarcely needs pointing out. Shakespeare, writing his King Lear, was evidently in some sort of trance; for the production of such a work of art an entranced condition seems as essential as it was for Blake when he conversed with the Man who Built the Pyramids. To create KingL·ar, or to believe that you have held communion with some historic personage—those are much the same thing.

MODERNISM AND HISTORICISM

19

To create a work of art, says Lewis, and to hold communion with the dead are much the same thing. For Eliot and Pound, I submit, they are the same thing. Lewis himself said as much when he wrote in another context that Pound "has really walked with Sophocles beside the Aegean; he has seen the Florence of Cavalcanti; there is almost nowhere in the past that he has not visited."49 Whether or not Lewis intended this to be a purely metaphorical description of Pound's historical sense is unclear; Pound himself will employ equally extravagant metaphors to describe his work, and whether or not they are to be taken literally also remains ambiguous. He often confessed that he "now and again had the lark of escaping the present" (GB, 48), and he wrote of art as a "witch-work" that can "throw us back into the age of truth." 50 These are extravagant statements, but the question of Pound's psychic experiences is beside the point. The fact that he represents his historical sense with the tale of Isis gathering the limbs of Osiris or Odysseus reviving the ghost of Tiresias (rather than, say, George Eliot's Mr. Casaubon searching for the key to all mythologies) reveals the intensity with which Pound approached the past. He is the heir of Oscar Wilde, who wrote about the joys of the historical sense more wonderfully than anyone before or since: It can help us to leave the age in which we were born, and to pass into other ages, and find ourselves not exiled from their air. It can teach us how to escape from our experience, and to realise the experiences of those who are greater than we are. The pain of Leopardi crying out against life becomes our pain. Theocritus blows on his pipe, and we laugh with the lips of nymph and shepherd. In the wolfskin of Pierre Vidal we flee before the hounds, and in the armour of Lancelot we ride from the bower of the Queen. We have whispered the secret of our love beneath the cowl of Abelard, and in the stained raiment of Villon have put our shame into song. We can see the dawn through Shelley's eyes, and when we wander with Endymion the Moon grows amorous of our youth.51 Although Oscar Wilde would probably have been the least likely person to have provoked Eliot's public admiration, Eliot's poetry does

20

INTRODUCTION

reveal a similar passion for the dead. In "Reflections on Contemporary Poetry," an essay Eliot published in the Egoist two months before the first installment of "Tradition and the Individual Talent," he used the metaphors of mysticism and metamorphosis to describe the workings of tradition: the relation of a living poet with his precursor is a feeling of profound kinship, or rather of a peculiar personal intimacy, with another, probably a dead author. It may overcome us suddenly, on first or after long acquaintance; it is certainly a crisis; and when a young writer is seized with his first passion of this sort he may be changed, metamorphosed almost, within a few weeks even, from a bundle of second-hand sentiments into a person. The imperative intimacy arouses for the first time a real, an unshakeable confidence. That you possess this secret knowledge, this intimacy, with the dead man, that after few or many years or centuries you should have appeared, with this indubitable claim to distinction; who can penetrate at once the thick and dusty circumlocutions about his reputation, can call yourself alone his friend.. . . We may not be great lovers; but if we had a genuine affair with a real poet of any degree we have acquired a monitor to avert us when we are not in love. Indirectly, there are other acquisitions: our friendship gives us an introduction to the society in which our friend moved; we learn its origins and its endings; we are broadened. We do not imitate, we are changed; and our work is the work of the changed man; we have not borrowed, we have been quickened, and we become bearers of a tradition.52 Thirty years later, in The Confidential Clerk, Eliot's protagonist, Sir Claude Mulhammer, reiterates this private, mystical sense of the past: There are occasions When I am transported—a different person, Transfigured in the vision of some marvellous creation, And I feel what the man must have felt when he made it. . . . when I am alone, and look at one thing long enough, I sometimes have that sense of identification With the maker, of which I spoke—an agonizing ecstasy

MODERNISM AND HISTORICISM

21

Which makes life bearable. It's all I have. I suppose it takes the place of religion.53 This intuitive sense of the past did not always operate successfully for Eliot; indeed there are moments in his prose when he sounds more like Mr. Casaubon than Oscar Wilde. From the time he was a graduate student in philosophy, Eliot was intensely aware of the hermeneutic intricacies inherent in understanding the past, and his skepticism often overcame his joyful sense of "a genuine affair" with a dead poet. Recalling a paper he wrote in a philosophy graduate seminar at Harvard, Eliot explained that he had decided that "in many cases no interpretation of a [primitive] rite could explain its origin."54 When a poet achieves an immediate, intimate relation with a dead poet, however, the thick and dusty layers of interpretation fall away, and the poet gains a "secret knowledge" (as Eliot wrote in "Reflections on Contemporary Poetry") of the "origins and . . . endings" of the past: he becomes a bearer of tradition. Eliot was able to overcome his skepticism with a moment of transcendental vision. Neither Pound nor Eliot displayed the visionary aspects of their art with the kind of openness that Wilde or Yeats did. Yeats explained his own sense of the past by proclaiming that the poet "alone can know the ancient records and be like some mystic courtier who has stolen the keys from the girdle of Time, and can wander where it please him amid the splendours of ancient Courts."55 Yeats found a touchstone for this openly visionary sense of the past in Shelley's Queen Mab: The Spirit, In ecstasy of admiration, felt All knowledge of the past revived; the events Of old and wondrous times, Which dim tradition interruptedly Teaches the credulous vulgar, were unfolded In just perspective to the view; Yet dim from their infinitude. The Spirit seemed to stand High on an isolated pinnacle; The flood of ages combating below,

INTRODUCTION

22

The depth of the unbounded universe Above, and all around Nature's unchanging harmony.56 In his early essay on "The Philosophy of Shelley's Poetry" Yeats wrote that this passage was "no more doubtless than a part of the machinery of the poem, but all the machineries of poetry are part of the convictions of antiquity, and readily become again convictions in minds that brood over them with visionary intensity."57 The Miltonic assurance that characterizes both Shelley's poem and Yeats's comment does not surface often in Pound or Eliot. But when it does, as in Eliot's "Reflections on Contemporary Poetry," it is all the more remarkable. Although their "poems including history" are in many ways a development of the early Yeats's desire to steep his poetry in the traditions of the past, they remained more ambivalent about their nineteenth-century precursors. Pound and Eliot were simultaneously profoundly visionary and rigorously skeptical poet-critics, Eliot being both the more visionary and the more skeptical of the two. Their skepticism led them to reject the nineteenth century's positivistic method for understanding history and at the same time led them to couch their historicism in terms that disguise its truly visionary character. In doing this, they were very much children of their age: in Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought 1890-1930, Stuart Hughes notes that although the period is best described as a time of "neo-romanticism or neo-mysticism," the greatest thinkers of the time (Hughes cites Freud, Dilthey, and Weber) sought to curb the mystical tendencies of their work.58 Like Wallace Stevens, Pound and Eliot were finally poets of high imagination, but as Stevens wrote in "Effects of Analogy" (adapting a phrase from Whitehead's Modes of Thought), "all their desire and all their ambition is to press away from mysticism toward that ultimate good sense which we term civilization."59 Both Pound and Eliot were attracted to a wide range of transcendental philosophies; they both valued Dante over all other poets, and while Pound absorbed the mediaeval mysticism of Richard of St. Victor and countered the positivism of modern philological method with

MODERNISM AND HISTORICISM

23

the Neoplatonism of Pater and Yeats, Eliot absorbed the modern mysticism of Evelyn Underhill and found inspiration for his own ideas about tradition in the nineteenth-century theologian Louis de Bonald's mystical philosophy of "traditionalism."60 The historical sense articulated by Pound and Eliot owes something to their reading of such historians and philosophers of history as Henry Adams, F. H. Bradley, Burckhardt, Nietzsche, and Max Simon Nordau, but it also owes a less apparent debt to more esoteric sources. Pound and Eliot both include spiritual manifestations of history in their poems; The Cantos and The Waste Land present hallucinatory landscapes where ghosts "patched with histories" (as Pound wrote in the 1917 version of Canto 1) assert the inescapable presence of the past. Both poems were written in the shadow of the Henry James who told ghost stories—the Henry James whom A. R. Orage described in "Henry James, and the Ghostly" (1918) as one who "would be happy among the dead, for he understood them while he was living. . . . His mission . . . was to act as a kind of Charon to ferry the understanding over the dark passages of the Styx and to show us that we are such stuff as ghosts are made of."61 It is not coincidental that in his essay on "The Hawthorne Aspect" of Henry James (printed in the same issue of the Little Review as Orage's essay) Eliot singled out James's ghostly The Sense of the Past as the culminating expression of the historical sense James gleaned from Hawthorne: Eliot praised James for having "taken Hawthorne's ghost-sense and given it substance,"62 that is, for giving a psychological obsession with the past a concrete reality in the presence of ghosts. Eliot did just that in the encounter with the ghostly "Stetson" in The Waste Land, where modern London merges with nineteenthcentury Paris, Renaissance England, and ancient Greece. Pound presented similar "ghostly visits" all through The Cantos. After the ghost of Tiresias appears in Canto 1, the ghost of Henry James himself appears in Canto 7: The old men's voices, beneath the columns of false marble The modish and darkish walls, Discreeter gilding, and the panelled wood Suggested, for the leasehold is

24

INTRODUCTION

Touched with an imprecision . . . about three squares; The house too thick, the paintings a shade too oiled. And the great domed head, congli occhi onesti e tardi Moves before me, phantom with weighted motion, Grave incessu, drinking the tone of things, And the old voice lifts itself weaving an endless sentence. (7/24) In depicting these ghostly presences, however, both Pound and Eliot (to borrow the words Stevens borrowed from Whitehead) pressed away from mysticism to the good sense of civilization. Understood as a metaphor for historical inquiry, Pound's reviving of the ghost of Tiresias in the final version of Canto 1 may be situated comfortably between two major trends of modern thought: the search for plausible explanations of psychic phenomena and the resurgence of idealistic theories of knowledge. In his essay "Henry James, and the Ghostly," Orage maintained that James was as much a psychologist as his brother William; Henry's task was the more difficult because his field was the "subconscious" rather than "conscious" psychology. The conscious can be studied by the scientist in the laboratory; the material is, moreover, largely under his control; and all the ordinary rules of scientific research apply to it. But the subconscious is a shyer creature altogether. It is not susceptible of direct observation; it cannot be conjured up or laid at will; it must be watched, attended upon, and delicately, oh most delicately, observed; it entails a discipline of the imagination and of the senses, and a discipline of the mind of the observer who must beware of even so much as breathing in the presence of the subconscious subject; in a word, its study is much more an art than a science. I am not suggesting that Henry James arrived by his method at any conclusions likely to be of value to the science of psychology. . . . At the same time, it would be possible, I hold, to discover in the solution of his works quite definite conclusions and quite definite theories which the intellect might precipitate into the crystallised dust of formal definitions.63

MODERNISM AND HISTORICISM

25

Orage was not alone in his feeling that the study of psychic phenomena (which he characterized as an "art") could be approached with something like "scientific" precision. As Samuel Hynes notes in The Edwardian Turn of Mind, the members of the Society for Psychical Research (organized in 1882) "intended to seek proof of these [spiritual] realities which would be scientifically acceptable." This statement gains greater force when one realizes that among the members of the S.P.R. were Henri Bergson, Samuel Clemens, C. L. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), Sigmund Freud, William James, John Ruskin, and Leslie Stephen. These men were "heirs of the Victorian crisis of belief, and in psychic research they found a solution to that crisis—scientific proof that men survived death and that the universe was morally coherent."64 Once the Great War began and English men and women sought even greater assurance of the eternal life of the soul in a coherent universe, membership in occult societies so increased that the Church of England instigated a formal inquiry into its declining membership.65 This rising interest in spiritualism is only one aspect of a major current in the intellectual life of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the idea shared by thinkers as diverse as Dilthey, Freud, and Saussure that meaning is not to be found in the "surface" of events, but in some "deeper" structure or reality that shapes the experiences of everyday life.66 In Germany Wilhelm Windelband wrote in "On the Mysticism of Our Time" (1910) that "once again the irrational is announced as the holy secret of all reality, as the fount of life lying beyond all [rational] knowledge."67 In France Henri Bergson wrote in his Introduction to Metaphysics (1903), as translated for his English audience by T. E. Hulme, that there is "one reality, at least, which we all seize from within, by intuition and not by simple analysis. It is our own personality in its flowing through time—our self which endures." In England Hulme was using Bergson's philosophy to fuel his own "war-dance" against Victorian materialism in the pages of the New Age.6S What united such disparate thinkers as Bergson and Windelband, as well as Dilthey, Croce, and William James, was their participation in this war-dance. Positivism was the common enemy; knowledge was

26

INTRODUCTION

no longer a product of the empirical observation of phenomena governed by identifiable laws. Summarizing the presuppositions that these thinkers held in common, Stuart Hughes writes that they all displaced the axis of social thought from the apparent and objectively verifiable to the only partially conscious area of unexplained motivation. In this sense the new doctrines were manifestly subjective. Psychological process had replaced external reality as the most pressing topic for investigation. It was no longer what actually existed that seemed most important: it was what men thought existed. And what they felt on the unconscious level had become more interesting than what they had consciously rationalized. Or—to formulate the change in still more radical terms—since it had apparently been proved impossible to arrive at any sure knowledge of behavior—if one must rely on flashes of subjective intuition or on the creation of convenient fictions—then the mind had indeed been freed from the bonds of the positivist method: it was at liberty to speculate, to imagine, to create.69 Once the methodology of positivist historiography was found to produce fictions, the historian could either languish in his realization of the impossibility of historical knowledge or redefine historical knowledge as something gleaned from artistic intuition rather than scientific categorization. Historical knowledge becomes an impossibility only for someone who denies history its status as a science but continues to think of scientific methods as the only viable avenue to knowledge. To illustrate this point with a parallel situation in contemporary literary theory, Walter Benn Michaels has remarked that the force of de Man's statement that "every interpretation 'falsifies' because every interpretation is finally 'fictional' " depends upon the assumption of an "idealized (impossible) account of the true."70 Like Dilthey, Croce saved historical knowledge by aligning it with the arts rather than with the sciences, with the penetration of historical evidence to discover a "deeper" reality rather than with the objective categorization of facts. Summarizing the view of history put forth in his "History Subsumed Under the Concept of Art" (1893), Croce wrote in his Aesthetic (1902) that we know the world in one of two

MODERNISM AND HISTORICISM

27

ways: either scientifically, perceiving the world according to predetermined laws, or artistically, intuiting the inner spirit of reality from its concrete manifestations. History does not involve a third way of knowing, says Croce; rather, historical knowledge is a subspecies of artistic knowledge: Historicity is incorrectly held to be a third theoretical form. History is not form, but content: as form, it is nothing but intuition or aesthetic fact. History does not seek for laws nor form concepts; it employs neither induction nor deduction; it is directed ad narrandum, non a demonstrandum; it does not construct universale and abstractions, but posits intuitions. The this and here, the Individuum omnimode determinatum, is its domain, as it is the domain of art. History, therefore, is included in the universal concept of art.71 By emphasizing the historian's personal involvement in his work, Croce concluded in a later book, History: Its Theory and Practice (1917), that "every true history is contemporary history."72 For the existential historian, history exists only in the present, as a product of his own consciousness. This understanding of history underlies Pound's comment in The Spirit of Romance (1910) that "all ages are contemporaneous" (SR, 6) and Eliot's more famous remark in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919) that all the literature of the past "has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order" (SW, 49). For Eliot, the great works of literary history form an "ideal order" because they are understood from the perspective of the present (that is, they are not "real," they cannot be known "as they were"); the "ideal order" is a function of the relativity of interpretation, not necessarily an absolute criterion that is exempt from the conditions of human knowledge. Like the existential historians, Pound and Eliot proceed from the assumption that knowledge does not lie on the surface of events, waiting to be collected by an impartial observer, but lurks within them. To uncover that knowledge, the interpreter must penetrate that surface—and such an effort demands the investment of the interpreter's own experience into his work. The "poems including history" written out of these presuppositions about the nature of historical knowledge

28

INTRODUCTION

consequently tend to take the form of a "palimpsest" rather than a chronological schema: The Cantos and The Waste Land display a present that is woven from the past in a complex tissue of allusions, a past that exists only as it lives in the texture of the present. The modernist historical sense that Eliot legitimized in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" does indeed lie, as Eliot intimated, at the edge of the "frontier of metaphysics or mysticism." And to understand the modern "poem including history," we must cross the frontier at the point where Eliot was willing to stay behind.

Chapter One

Pater and Yeats: The Dicta of the Great Critics

In 1908, just before he sailed for Europe, Pound spent a few weeks at Wabash College in Indiana, earning his keep as an instructor of Romance languages. It was a stifling experience, and it probably catalyzed his decision to travel abroad. For Pound, America in the early 1900s was much like the America that Henry James described so vividly in his book on Hawthorne. James made a list of everything Hawthorne's America lacked: No state, in the European sense of the word, and indeed barely a specific national name. No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages, nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities nor public schools—no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class—no Epsom or Ascot!1 In short, no tradition, no history, no past. While at Wabash College Pound wrote the poem "In Durance" in which he confessed, I am homesick after mine own kind And ordinary people touch me not. Yea, I am homesick After mine own kind that know, and feel And have some breath for beauty and the arts. (CEP, 86) Pound needed to travel abroad to discover his own kind; in Europe he would "meet kindred e'en as I am, I Flesh-shrouded bearing the secret" (CEP, 86). Pound sought the living who bore the secrets of the dead. When he arrived in London, he found the secret in the person of

30

CHAPTER 1

W. B. Yeats. Pound had long admired and imitated Yeats's poetry and prose, but the very presence of the older poet took on a new significance. "The personal acquaintance with older artists who have been discoverers is a thing beyond all price" Pound wrote in Patria Mia (1913; SP, 139). But his personal acquaintance with Yeats did more than provide intimate contact with the person he considered the "great living poet" (L, 7-8); Yeats himself, the living man, became Pound's personal Tiresias, his connection to the past. In "How I Began" (1913) Pound looked back over his first five years in England: Besides knowing living artists I have come in touch with the tradition of the dead. . . . I have relished this or that about "old Browning, or Shelley sliding down his front banisters "with almost incredible rapidity." There is more, however, in this sort of Apostolic Succession than a ludicrous anecdote, for people whose minds have been enriched by contact with men of genius retain the effects of it. I have enjoyed meeting Victorians and Pre-Raphaelites and men of the nineties through their friends. I have seen Keats' proof sheets. I have had personal tradition of his time second-hand. This, perhaps, means little to a Londoner, but it is good fun if you have grown up regarding such things as about as distant as Ghengis Khan or the days of Lope de Vega.2 In the wilds of Indiana—and even in the graduate seminars in Romance philology at the University of Pennsylvania—the tradition Pound craved seemed irretrievable. In England, he recovered the dead by meeting the living who retained the past in their very selves. Yeats became Pound's guide through a poetic underworld inhabited by Rhymers, Pre-Raphaelites, Victorians, Shelley, and Keats. Pound's conception of the mechanism of tradition as an "Apostolic Succession" is itself quite Yeatsian in its dependence upon the lasting effects of the spiritual presence of the dead. In "Histrion" (1908), one of the earliest poems he published, Pound explained his ability to possess and be possessed by long-dead spirits. This is a process long practiced, but never before explained in prose or rhyme, says Pound:

PATERANDYEATS

31

No man hath dared to write this thing as yet, And yet I know, how that the souls of all men great At times pass through us, And we are melted into them, and are not Save reflexions of their souls. Thus I am Dante for a space and am One Frangois Villon, ballad-lord and thief Or am such holy ones I may not write, Lest blasphemy be writ against my name; This for an instant and the flame is gone. 'Tis as in midmost us there glows a sphere Translucent, molten gold, that is the "I" And into this some form projects itself: Christus, or John, or eke the Florentine; And as the clear space is not if a form's Imposed thereon, So cease we from all being for the time, And these, the Masters of the Soul, live on. (CEP, 71) Sanford Schwartz has pointed out that these lines celebrate a "principle of psychic unity" that also lies at the center of Dilthey's historicism: "Dilthey speaks of 'the intimate kinship of all human psychic life' that makes it possible to communicate across the centuries. Pound says the same thing in the more rarified medium he adopted from Neoplatonic philosophy. . . . Despite the differences that separate one soul (or one age) from another, we possess the capacity to identify with any expression of life. . . . It is this kinship between ourselves and our predecessors that allows us to transcend our own temporal horizon and participate in an enduring cultural tradition."3 Like Dilthey, Pound based his historicism on the belief in a transhistorical spirit that unites all individuals. "The soul of each man," he wrote in I Gather the Limbs of Osiris, "is compounded of all the elements of the cosmos of souls" (SP, 28). Yet Pound did find his vocabulary for this general consciousness in Neoplatonic philosophy— both ancient and modern. Soon after his arrival in London Pound began to think strenuously about the nature of historical inquiry, and he

32

CHAPTER 1

formulated a rigorous historicism in his prose works, The Spirit ofRomance (1910) and I Gather the Limbs of Osiris (1911-1912). The Spirit ofRomance was based on a course of lectures Pound gave early in 1909 at the Regent Street Polytechnic on "The Development of Literature in Southern Europe." In his introductory lecture on the "search for the essential qualities of literature," he reviewed the "Dicta of the great critics:—Plato, Aristotle, Longinus, Dante, Coleridge, De Quincey, Pater and Yeats."4 This list reads like an abbreviated but standard syllabus for a course in the history of criticism until it reaches the nineteenth century; after Coleridge we would expect Arnold's name to appear. But Pound had no sympathy for Arnold's voice of social and academic legitimacy. Rebelling against his training in philology at the University of Pennsylvania, Pound wanted to forge a criticism that would not divorce poetry—especially the poetry of the past—from the intensity of lived experience. If "Arnold considered poetry as a part of literature," Pound wrote in The Spirit of Romance, "then his definition of literature as 'criticism of life' is the one notable blasphemy that was born of his mind's frigidity" (SR, 222). Pound countered Arnold's frigidity with the fire of Walter Pater, the critic who urged that "to burn always with [a] hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life."5 When Pound wrote in The Spirit of Romance that "poetry is about as much a 'criticism of life' as a red-hot iron is the criticism of the fire" (SR, 222), he invoked Pater's flame to undermine Arnold's sober dictum. Pound's reasons for placing Pater and Yeats at the end of his list of great critics are clear: given his distaste for Arnold's air of academic legitimacy, Pound naturally turned to the aesthetes, critics who spoke the secret language of the poet instead of the public voice of the sage. To understand the methods of historical interpretation that Pound outlined in The Spirit of Romance and I Gather the Limbs of Osiris, we must begin with the criticism of Pater and Yeats. In their Neoplatonic doctrines of a general consciousness, Pound discovered the inspiration for his own. Although Pater is known best for his description of the "narrow chamber of the individual mind" in the "Conclusion" to The Renaissance, he was, as Peter Dale asserts in The Victorian Critic and the Idea of History, "a good deal more concerned with tracing the historical de-

PATER AND YEATS

33

velopment of speculative culture or the general consciousness of mankind."6 Like most of Pater's disciples, we still tend to associate him with the fragile solipsism of the "Conclusion" to The Renaissance rather than the copious retraction and reformulation of that doctrine that he undertook in Marius the Epicurean (1885) and Plato and Phtonism (1893). Part of the reason for the dominance of the early Pater is that his most famous disciples, Arthur Symons, George Moore, and (in some moods) Oscar Wilde, trumpeted the solipsistic doctrine of the "Conclusion" long after Pater devoted himself to other concerns. In "Divergent Disciples of Walter Pater" John Pick points out that Lionel Johnson was "one of the very few disciples who grew with Pater . . . [and] passed on to higher doctrines in Marius and Plato and PIatonisrn."1 Along with Johnson, Yeats and Pound may be included among those disciples who were attracted not so much to the Pater who asserted that every individual is "a solitary prisoner in its own dream of a world," but the Pater who declared that man is "not . . . simple and isolated; for the mind of the race, the character of the age, sway him this way or that through the medium of language and current ideas" with "remote laws of inheritance, the vibration of longpast acts reaching him in the midst of the new order of things in which he lives."8 It is this historicism, this faith in a general consciousness that unites all individuals, past and present, that Pater bequeathed to his modernist disciples. The historical method of Pater's Renaissance and Plato and Platonism was received negatively during the nineteenth century; these works were criticized for their lack of scientific "objectivity."9 Pater realized long before most of his English contemporaries, however, that history was not objective or scientific in nature. Like Dilthey, he knew that the individual interpreter does not stand removed from the past but is in fact connected to the past by what Pater called a "general consciousness." He understands the past by focusing on what he holds in common with it and by injecting it with the vitality of his life in the present. InPhto andPhtonism Pater's "general consciousness" functions in much the same way as Dilthey's "spirit" or "life": See! we might say, there is a general consciousness, a permanent common sense, independent indeed of each one of us, but with

34

CHAPTER 1

which we are, each one of us, in communication. It is in that, those common or general ideas really reside. And we might add just here . . . that those abstract or common notions come to the individual mind through language, through common or general names, Animal, Justice, Equality, into which one's individual experience, little by little, drop by drop, conveys their full meaning or content; and, by the instrumentality of such terms and notions, thus locating the particular in the general, mediating between general and particular, between our individual experience and the common experience of our kind, we come to understand each other, and to assist each other's thoughts, as in a common mental atmosphere, an "intellectual world," as Plato calls it.10 Like Dilthey, Pater emphasizes the concrete "lived" nature of this general consciousness; it is not so much an abstract spirit as a matrix established by the continuities of language and culture. Pater uses this general consciousness as the basis for what he calls an "imaginative method" of historical reconstruction: as in Dilthey's hermeneutics, Pater contends that we understand the past through the elements it shares in common with the present, "through a multitude of stray hints in art and poetry and religious custom, through modern speculation on the tendencies of early thought, through traits and touches in our own actual states of mind, which may seem sympathetic with those tendencies."11 For both Pater and Dilthey history is finally the equivalent of personal experience because the present itself is woven from the remnants of the entire past. The existential historian, as I have said, believes that "all history is contemporary history." This belief in the presence of the past—and the more demanding belief that it is only as a living presence that we know the past—lies at the core of Pater's entire aesthetic. Here is his most famous piece of writing, his prose poem on La Gioconda, as Yeats presented it as the first modern poem in his edition of The Oxford Book ofModern Verse (1936): She is older than the rocks among which she sits; Like the Vampire, She has been dead many times,

PATER AND YEATS

35

And learned the secrets of the grave; And has been a diver in deep seas, And keeps their fallen day about her; And trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; And, as Leda, Was the mother of Helen of Troy, And, as St Anne, Was the mother of Mary; And all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, And lives Only in the delicacy With which it has moulded the changing lineaments, And tinged the eyelids and the hands.12 La Gioconda may stand as both the "symbol of the modern idea" and the "embodiment of the old fancy," as Pater wrote in The Renaissance,13 because for Pater, what is modern is nothing more than the sum of everything that has preceded it. Wilde seconded this sense of the modern in "The Critic as Artist" when he wrote that we must live "not merely our own lives, but the collective life of the race, and so to make ourselves absolutely modern, in the true meaning of the word modernity."14 Like the portrait of the Mona Lisa, the present is layered with the remnants of the entire past, the contents of the general consciousness. In Phto and Platonism Pater described the principle that lies behind his description of Leonardo's lady: The thoughts of Plato, like the language he has to use . . . are covered with the traces of previous labour and have had their earlier proprietors. If at times we become aware in reading him of certain anticipations of modern knowledge, we are also quite obviously among the relics of an older, a poetic or half-visionary world. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that in Plato, in spite of his wonderful savour of literary freshness, there is nothing absolutely new: or rather, as in many other very original products of human genius, the seemingly new is old also, a palimpsest, a tapestry of which the actual threads have served before.15

36

CHAPTER 1

For Pater, every object in the present, anything we experience in the present, is structured as a palimpsest—the dialogues of Plato,La Gioconda, or even the words we use to describe them. By living in the present, we live historically; by observing the world around us, we come to know the past, and we come to know that the present and the past cannot be separated. Pater developed a sophisticated existential historicism at the same time that British and American historians were trying to catch up with Comte's positivist vision of history. In his History of Civilization in England (1856-1861), Henry Thomas Buckle professed his desire to write a history that would fulfill Mill's Comptean proposition that the course of history is subject to general laws: I hope to accomplish for the history of man something equivalent, or at all events analogous, to what has been effected by other inquirers for the different branches of natural science. In regard to nature, events apparently the most irregular and capricious have been explained, and have been shown to be in accordance with certain fixed and universal laws.16 In the United States, as Henry Adams recalled in his "The Tendency of History" (1894), historians who knew Buckle's work and then read Darwin's The Origin ofthe Species felt "the violent impulse which Darwin gave to the study of natural laws, [and] never doubted that historians would follow until they had exhausted every possible hypothesis to create a science of history."17 In Germany, Droysen had challenged positivistic historiography and paved the way for Dilthey's work, but in England Buckle's call for a science of history remained the norm until well into the twentieth century. When J. B. Bury succeeded Lord Acton as the Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, he wrote in his inaugural lecture, "The Science of History," that it "has not yet become superfluous to insist that history is a science, no less no more."18 Although Pater wrote a different sort of history than Buckle or Bury, his awareness of the intricacies of interpretation and his denial of the positivist goal of scientific objectivity make him a forerunner of modern historicism. Along with Dilthey and Croce, Pater believed

PATERANDYEATS

37

that the study of history could never be a science, and like these philosophers of history, he found the inspiration and confirmation of his historicism in poetry. Although Dilthey admitted that the "limitation of poetry is that it has no method for understanding life," he felt that the historian could learn a great deal from the poet: "through his empathy the poet restores the relationship to life which receded in the course of intellectual development and practical interests."19 Pater found one inspiration for his historicism in the poetry of Wordsworth. Although his theory of the general consciousness owes a great deal to his reading of Plato and the Pre-Socratics, to Hegel and the German idealists,20 he inevitably brings his discussions of the general consciousness back to Wordsworth: For in truth we come into the world, each one of us, "not in nakedness," but by the natural course of organic development clothed far more completely than even Pythagoras supposed in a vesture of the past, nay, fatally shrouded, it might seem, in those laws or tricks of heredity which we mistake for our volitions; in the language which is more than one half of our thoughts; in the moral and mental habits, the customs, the literature, the very houses which we did not make for ourselves; in the vesture of a past, which is (so science would assure us) not ours, but of the race, the species: that Zeitgeist, or abstract secular process, in which, as we could have had no direct consciousness of it, so we can pretend to no future personal interest. It is humanity itself now—abstract humanity—that figures as the transmigrating soul, accumulating into its "colossal manhood" the experience of the ages; making use of, and casting aside in its march, the souls of countless individuals, as Pythagoras supposed the individual soul to cast aside again and again its outworn body.21 In this discussion of the Pythagorean process of metempsychosis in P/flto and Platonism, Pater enacts the very "hereditary" process he describes: by discussing Pythagoras in terms of Darwin, Hegel, and Wordsworth, he reveals how the idea of a general consciousness has indeed become part of our general consciousness. In the first sentence

38

CHAPTER 1

of this passage ("For we come into the world, each one of us, 'not in nakedness' ") Pater refers to Wordsworth's "Intimations" ode. Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy!22 Pater has de-idealized Wordsworth to a certain degree; the individual comes clothed not in abstract "clouds of glory" but in the language, customs, morals, and literature of his ancestors. Although Pater read about the ideas of a general consciousness in Pythagoras and Hegel, it is Wordsworth's sensitivity to the intricacies involved in understanding our relationship with the past that he recalls when he discusses these philosophers. And Pater bequeathed this idea of a general consciousness, along with the recognition that the idea itself has a long tradition, to the school of his divergent disciples that includes W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound.23 In his Autobiography Yeats wrote that his generation "looked consciously to Pater for our philosophy. . . . Perhaps it was because of Pater's influence that we with an affectation of learning, claimed the whole past of literature for our authority,. . . that we were traditional in our dress, in our manner, in our opinions, and in our style."24 As Richard Bizot has shown in the best study of "Pater and Yeats," it was not the solipsism of the "Conclusion" to The Renaissance but Pater's general consciousness that was most important for Yeats.25 Pater showed Yeats the way to find the past living in the present—how to be modern and traditional at the same time. In "A Ballad Singer" (1891) Yeats wrote that the "doctrines I have just been studying in Pater's [Marius the Epicurean] . . . —the Platonic theory of spiritual beings having their abode in all things without and within us, and thus uniting all things, as by a living ladder of souls, with God himself—have

PATER AND YEATS

39

some relation to those very matters of Irish thought that bring me to Ireland just now."26 What had brought Yeats to Ireland was his desire to reclaim the traditions of Irish folklore. The passage in Marius to which he refers is probably the great epiphany at the end of the third section of the novel, where Marius realizes that he is not isolated, locked in his own mind, but part of "a living and companionable spirit at work in all things, of which he had become aware from time to time in his old philosophic readings—in Plato and others." Marius realizes that his "very self is determined by "an intellectual or spiritual system external to it, diffused through all time and place."27 In Pater's historicism, his belief that the past lives in the fibers of the present, Yeats found the impulse for his own theories of the "Great Memory" and "Anima Mundi." James Olney has comprehensively shown that the traditions of western Platonism lie behind these Yeatsian doctrines, but he is careful to point out that Yeats did not absorb his Platonism first hand.28 As Pater himself points out, the idea of a general consciousness is to be found in thinkers from Pythagoras to Wordsworth, and it is probable that Yeats learned about this long tradition from Pater, the writer to whom he looked consciously for his philosophy. For the early Yeats, poetry had to be absorbed in the past to be valuable and interesting. In Ideas of Good and Evil (1903) he wrote that "literature dwindles to a mere chronicle of circumstance, or passionless fantasies, and passionless meditations, unless it is constantly flooded with the passions and beliefs of ancient times." Yeats sought to incorporate into his verse "images that remind us of vast passions, the vagueness of past times, all the chimeras that haunt the edge of trance . . . a style that remembers many masters that it may escape contemporary suggestion."29 "The Secret Rose" from The Wind Among the Reeds (1889) provides Yeats's most programmatic illustration of this style: Thy great leaves unfold The ancient beards, the helms of ruby and gold Of the crowned Magi; and the king whose eyes Saw the Pierced Hands and the Rood of elder rise

40

CHAPTER 1

In Druid vapour and make the torches dim; Till vain frenzy awoke and he died; and him Who met Fand walking among flaming dew By a grey shore where the wind never blew, And lost the world and Emer for a kiss; And him who drove the gods out of their liss, And till a hundred morns had flowered red Feasted, and wept the barrows of his dead; And the proud dreaming king who flung the crown And sorrow away, and calling bard and clown Dwelt among the wine-stained wanderers in deep woods; And him who sold tillage, and house, and goods, And sought through lands and islands numberless years, Until he found, with laughter and with tears, A woman of so shining loveliness That men threshed corn at midnight by a tress, A little stolen tress.30 Yeats addresses the "secret rose," that most evocative of symbols, and rehearses the long list of past experiences held in the "Great Memory" that is woven into its petals. Like Pater's La Gioconda, Yeats's rose is a symbol of the "modern idea" by virtue of the fact that it is composed of the entire past. Yeats's poem, in fact, is modeled on Pater's prosepoem; it borrows its rhythms, its suppression of active verbs, and its paratactic syntax linking all the previous lives of the rose. When Yeats began The Oxford Book of Modern Verse with Pater's prose-poem, he broke it into line lengths so that as in "The Secret Rose" the conjunctions pile one on top of the other at the beginning of each line. In his Malatesta Cantos Pound would borrow this rhetorical device to include history in his poem. Throughout these cantos, the "ands" line up in much the same way, avoiding the idea of linear causation in time and stressing the idea that all history is contemporaneous: And the wind is still for a little And the dusk rolled to one side a little And he was twelve at the time, Sigismundo,

PATER AND YEATS

41

And And And And

no dues had been paid for three years, his elder brother gone pious; that year they fought in the streets, that year he got out to Cesena And brought back the levies, And that year he crossed by night over Foglia . . . (8/32-33) Michael Bernstein has shown how Pound needed to reject the symbolist tradition of "pure poetry" in order to write a poem including the raw materials of history.31 Yet Pound's use of this Yeatsian-Paterian rhetorical pattern to include history in the Malatesta Cantos reveals that his impulse is not so far from Yeats's in "The Secret Rose." Yeats folds a mythic past into his poem; Pound dumps a mailbag of documents on the page. Yet both poems insist upon the enduring qualities of the past and show how poetry springs from a dialogue between past and present. In Yeats's work it is always unclear whether the elements of the "Great Memory" emanate from some pretemporal paradigm or accumulate from centuries of ancestral experience. As OIney points out, if Yeats has a choice, he usually chooses to have it both ways: in "The Symbolism of Poetry" he says that symbols evoke certain emotions "either because of their preordained energies or because of long association."32 It is always clear, however, that Yeats's "Great Memory" involves a kind of existential historicism. For Yeats, the past can be found nowhere but in the present, in the very self of the poet: "I know that revelation is from the self," he wrote in his Autobiography, "but from that age-long memoried self, that shapes the elaborate shell of the mollusc and the child in the womb, that teaches the birds to make their nest."33 Individuals have access to the history stored up in the "Great Memory" because their very selves are forged from that memory. In "Private Thoughts," an essay from On the Boiler (1939), Yeats looked back over the many years of his life and described the nature of his long-abiding interest in the past: Now that I am old and live in the past I often think of those ancestors of whom I have some detailed information. . . . Then, as my

42

CHAPTER 1

mood deepens, I discover all these men in my single mind, think that I myself have gone through the same vicissitudes, that I am going through them all at this very moment, and wonder if the balance has come right; then I go beyond those minds and my single mind and discover that I have been describing everybody's struggle, and the gyres turn in my thoughts. Vico was the first modern philosopher to discover in his own mind, and in the European past, all human destiny. "We can know nothing," he said, "that we have not made." Swift, too, Vico's contemporary, in his first political essay saw history as personal experience, so too did Hegel in his Philosophy ofHistory.34 If Yeats had known Dilthey's work, he might have added to his comments on Vico, Swift, and Hegel, Dilthey's important realization that the first condition for the possibility of the study of history is that the historian himself is "a historical being, that the man who studies history is the man who makes history." (And although Diithey probably did not know Vico's work well, several commentators have noticed the striking similarities in their conceptions of the "human studies.")35 Like Diithey, Yeats lived in the past by living the fullest possible life in the present. Participating in what Pater called the "general consciousness," what Diithey called "spirit" or "life," and what Yeats called the "Great Memory," Yeats believed that he experienced the past within the palimpsest of his single mind. Yeats was not a historian, of course, but his thought does reveal the contours of existential historicism—especially the "visionary instinct" and "the quality of rapt attention , . . [and] immense aesthetic excitement" with which, as Jameson notes, the existential historian approaches a moment in the past. Both Diithey and Pound borrow the nekyia of the Odyssey, where Odysseus pours out blood for the ghosts of the past, as a metaphor for historical reconstruction. For Yeats this was more than a metaphor; in his occult experiments, Yeats found support for his mystical sense of the past. In "Swedenborg, Mediums, and the Desolate Places" (1914), an essay that rehearses the theory of the "Anima Mundi" that would be given its fullest expression in Per Arnica Silentia Lunae (1918), Yeats

PATER AND YEATS

43

wrote that in reading Swedenborg, he came upon "a discovery one had thought peculiar to the last generation, that the 'most minute particulars which enter the memory remain there and are never obliterated.' " By the "last generation" Yeats no doubt means the Paterians who had first introduced him to the Pythagorean or Wordsworthian theory of a "general consciousness." Yeats goes on to explain something that Pater did not teach him—that we need the help of spirits (Daimons, he would soon call them) to tap this collective memory: There as here we do not always know all that is in our memory, but at need angelic spirits who act upon us there as here, widening and deepening the consciousness at will, can draw forth all the past, and make us live again all our transgressions and see our victims "as if they were present, together with the place, words, and motives."36 In the spiritualist doctrines of the occult Yeats found a way to turn Pater's more properly historical interest in the past into his own kind of poetic mysticism. What links Yeatsian mysticism to the historicism exemplified by Dilthey, however, is the belief in some kind of transhistorical spiritual world that encompasses all the elements of the past and the individual interpreter in the present. By exploring the depths of his own consciousness, he discovers the past. The historical sense articulated by Pound and Eliot is in many ways an elaboration of the historicism developed by Pater and Yeats, the last of Pound's "great critics." Set beside Yeats's claim that the poet is a "mystic courtier who has stolen the keys from the girdle of Time, and can wander where it please him amid the splendours of ancient Courts," Eliot's claim in "Reflections on Contemporary Poetry" that the poet can penetrate the dusty layers of scholarship and possess a "feeling of profound kinship, or rather of a peculiar personal intimacy, with . . . a dead author" no longer seems quite so idiosyncratic. Yet it is only in rare moments of candidness that Eliot's rhetoric matches Yeats's. In a review of Yeats's The Cutting ofan Agate (1919), written around the same time as "Tradition and the Individual Talent" and "Reflections on Contemporary Poetry," Eliot quotes this passage from Yeats's prose:

44

CHAPTER 1

The end of art is the ecstasy awakened by the presence before an ever-changing mind of what is permanent in the world, or by the arousing of that mind itself into the very delicate and fastidious mood habitual with it when it is seeking those permanent and recurring things. In response, Eliot writes, Why introduce mind? why not say—the recognition of the permanent in the changing, and the recognition of the protean identity of the permanent with the changing?37 This dialectic of the "permanent" and the "changing"—is it not the interpenetration of the "timeless" and the "temporal" of which Eliot speaks in "Tradition and the Individual Talent"?—is it not, to use Yeats's terms, the interaction of the "Anima Hominis" with the "Anima Mundi"? It is finally Yeats's rhetoric—not his subject matter—to which the Eliot of "Tradition and the Individual Talent" objects. Pound's I Gather the Limbs of Osiris, standing midway between the early Yeats and The Sacred Wood, shows how the dicta of the Great Critics were passed on to Eliot and then transformed into the most codified presentation of the historical sense in modernist poetics.

Chapter Two

I Gather the Limbs of Osiris

After Pound published The Spirit ofRomance, The Sonnets andBallate ofGuido Cavalcanti, and I Gather the Limbs of Osiris, as well as several books of his own verse, he took a moment to look back over his shoulder to the America he had left behind. In "Epilogue" (1912), subtitled "to my five books containing mediaeval studies, experiments and translations," Pound wrote, I bring you my spoils, my nation, I, who went out in exile, Am returned to thee with gifts. I, who have laboured long in the tombs, And come back therefrom with riches. Behold my spices and robes, my nation, My gifts of Tyre. Here are my times of the south; Here are strange fashions of music; Here is my knowledge. Behold, I am come with patterns; Behold, I return with devices, Cunning the craft, cunning the work, the fashion. (CEP, 209) Tyre, known as the "queen of the sea," was the most wealthy and powerful city of ancient Phoenicia. The prophet Ezekiel described her best: "Thou hast been in Eden the garden of God; every precious stone was thy covering, the sardius, topaz, and the diamond, the beryl, the onyx, and the jasper, the sapphire, the emerald, and the carbuncle, and gold." But Tyre was a proud city and she had to fall: "I will make thee a terror, and thou shalt be no more: though thou be sought for, yet shalt thou never be found again, saith the Lord God"

46

CHAPTER 2

(Ezek. 28:13; 26:21). Pound spent his entire life working to rebuild this city. Ecbatana, "the city of Dioce," he called it in the Pisan Cantos, "whose terraces are the colours of stars" (74/425). With the powers of his historical sense, Pound believed that he could reclaim past glories that had been thought to have been lost forever. 1 Gather the Limbs of Osiris reveals his first steps toward the starlit terraces. I Gather the Limbs of Osiris was published in twelve issues of the New Age from 30 November 1911 to 22 February 1912, with a note explaining that "under this heading Mr. Pound will contribute expositions and translations in illustration of 'The New Method' in Scholarship."1 The subtle design of the work has never been fully appreciated because it has never been properly reprinted: the twelve sections alternate translations of Anglo-Saxon, Cavalcanti, and Daniel with prose ruminations on the historical method. The closest relation to I Gather the Limbs of Osiris is William Carlos Williams's Spring and All (1923), a work that has suffered a similar fate, its more famous poems often reprinted without the context of Williams's prose. In order to make the rather intricate design of Pound's work clear, I offer this outline of/ Gather the Limbs of Osiris as it originally appeared in the New Age: I. II. III. W. V. VI. VII. VIII. IX. X. XI. XII.

The Seafarer A Rather Dull Introduction [prose] [Cavalcanti translations] A Beginning [prose] Four Early Poems ofArnaut Daniel On Virtue [prose] Arnaut Daniel: Canzoni of his Middle Period Canzon: Of The Trades and Love [prose and Daniel translation] On Technique [prose] On Music [prose] [Daniel translation and prose commentary] Three Canzoni ofArnaut Daniel

The first six sections of/ Gather the Limbs of Osiris alternate poetry with prose; after the central and most important section "On Virtue,"

I GATHER THE LIMBS OF OSIRIS

47

the design becomes looser, and each section contains both poetry and prose. Neither the translations nor the prose commentaries are subservient to one another; the poems not only illustrate but help to describe Pound's historical method. As if in illustration of Burckhardt's dictum that "history finds in poetry not only one of its most important but also one of its purest and finest sources,"2 I Gather the Limbs of Osiris opens with a poem that embodies Pound's "New Method of Scholarship" and follows it up with a prose explanation of the method that uses for its text not poetry but a passage from Burckhardt's Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). Before turning to these first two sections, we should remember that, as Hugh Kenner has pointed out, the "New Method of Scholarship" begins in the very title of Pound's work.3 Just as he uses the reclamation of the city of Tyre as a metaphor for his work in "Epilogue," Pound uses the myth of Isis and Osiris as a metaphor for his historicism in I Gather the Limbs of Osiris. According to ancient Egyptian legends (and Plutarch, who first told the story in a complete form), Osiris was murdered, and his body rent into fourteen pieces and the pieces scattered across the land. Isis, his sister and wife, traveled abroad gathering the limbs. Sir James Frazer summarized the remainder of the legend in The Golden Bough: hearing Isis's sorrowful laments, the sun-god Ra sent down from heaven the jackal-headed god Anubis, who, with the aid of Isis and Nephthys, of Thoth and Horus, pieced together the broken body of the murdered god, swathed it in linen bandages, and observed all the other rites which the Egyptians were wont to perform over the bodies of the departed. Then Isis fanned the cold clay with her wings: Osiris revived, and thenceforth reigned as king over the dead in the other world. . . . In the resurrection of Osiris the Egyptians saw the pledge of a life everlasting for themselves beyond the grave.4 In identifying himself with Isis, Pound represents his work as the reclamation and resurrection of the dead. Despite Pound's studied awareness of the philosophical background to modern historicism— and despite his attempts at a sophisticated vocabulary to describe his

48

CHAPTER 2

"New Method of Scholarship"—this mystical faith in his ability to breathe his own life into the past underlies all his translations and poetic recreations of the past. In his translations Pound was not so interested in the philological accuracy of his text or even in the production of beautiful verse. In response to a review of his The Sonnets and Battate ofGuido Cavakanti (1912) in the Times Literary Supplement Pound wrote that while Rossetti was "avowedly intent on making beautiful verses" he was equally as intent "on presenting an individual" (PSL, 177). Like Isis Pound sought to bring the individual back to life; the scholarly work, gathering the limbs, was only half the project, and the work would be useless unless the scholar-poet were able to fan his wings over the dead clay. In his preface to "Sestina: Altaforte," written about Bertran de Born, Pound wrote, "Judge ye! Have I dug him up again?" (CEP, 108). Just as Pound sought out Yeats because he felt that direct contact with a living author is "a thing beyond all price," Pound also sought direct contact with the dead by reconstructing (to use Dilthey's phrase) the "lived experience" of the past. Pound's translation of "The Seafarer," the first installment of I Gather the Limbs of Osiris, has been criticized in light of Pound's claim that it is "as nearly literal . . . as any translation can be" (XI.369). As Fred Robinson has shown, however, Pound's famous howlers and his deletion of the Christian elements of the poem "are simply accurate reflections of the standard scholarly doctrine" he absorbed from Henry Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Reader. While Robinson is right to point out that the translation was not designed as a reflection of Pound's own preoccupations, his assertion that it "was done for precisely the opposite reason, to recover the real, original AngloSaxon poem, as that process of recovery was understood by scholars in his day," is in one sense true and in another sense misleading.5 Most of I Gather the Limbs of Osiris is taken up with an argument against the standard philological method of the day, and Pound's translation of "The Seafarer" must be seen in the context of the entire sequence of/ Gather the Limbs of Osiris. In the second section of the sequence, "A Rather Dull Introduction," Pound begins to explain his new method of scholarship. Op-

I GATHER THE LIMBS OF OSIRIS

49

posed to the "method of sentiment and generalization" and the "method of multitudinous detail," Pound offers the "method of Luminous Detail." A parable illustrates Pound's rejection of the positivistic philological method he learned in graduate school: If a man owned mines in South Africa he would know that his labourers dug up a good deal of mud and an occasionaljewel, looking rather like the mud about it. If he shipped all the mud and uncut stones northward and dumped them in one heap on the shore of Iceland, in some inaccessible spot, we should not consider him commercially sound. In my own department of scholarship I should say the operations are rather of this complexion. There are many fine things discovered, edited, and buried. Much very dull "literature" is treated in like manner. They are dumped in one museum and certain learned men rejoice in the treasure. They also complain of a lack of public interest in their operations. (11.130) Like Croce, Pound objected to an historical method that divorced the interest in the past from the concerns of life in the present. Writing at about the same time as Pound, Croce condemned this antiquarian mentality in modern philology: What we all of us do at every moment when we note dates and other matters concerning our private affairs (chronicles) in our pocketbooks, or when we place in their little caskets ribbons and dried flowers (I beg to be allowed to select these pleasant images, when giving instances of the collection of "documents"), is done on a large scale by a certain class of workers called philologists, as specially known as the erudite when they collect evidence and narrations, as archeologists and archivists when they collect documents and monuments, as the places where such objects are kept (the "silent white abode of the dead") are called libraries, archives, museums. Against this positivist mode of inquiry, Croce asserts that"history is in all of us and . . . its sources are in our own breasts."6 For Croce, philological history is useless and finally "untrue" because it is not imbued with the living presence of the historian. He distinguishes be-

50

CHAPTER 2

tween two forms of history: history proper and chronicle. These two forms of history represent "two different spiritual attitudes." While a "chronicle" is a mere massing together of the events of the past, a true "history" takes place in the mind of the historian as he brings those past events to life. This distinction precipitates Croce's assertion that "every true history is contemporary history." Thus if contemporary history springs straight from life, so too does that history which is called non-contemporary, for it is evident that only an instant in the life of the present can move one to investigate past fact. Therefore this past fact does not answer to a past interest, but to a present interest in so far as it is unified with an interest of the present life.7 Like the historians of his time, Pound was engaged in a large-scale attack on the positivistic method of his teachers. In the autumn of 1906, when he was still enrolled in graduate courses in Dante, Spanish Drama, Provenial, and French Phonetics at the University of Pennsylvania, Pound published an essay on "Raphaelite Latin" in the Philadelphia Book News Monthly. This attack on the "Germanic ideal of scholarship" may account for his professors' later unwillingness to accept The Spirit ofRomance in place of his Ph.D. dissertation. Pound began his essay by stating that perhaps "the most neglected field in all literature" is the work of the Latin writers who were the contemporaries of Raphael. There are causes for this neglect. The scholars of classic Latin, bound to the Germanic ideal of scholarship, are no longer able as of old to fill themselves with the beauty of the classics, and by the very force of that beauty inspire their students to read Latin widely and for pleasure; nor are they able to make students see clearly whereof classic beauty consists. The scholar is compelled to spend most of his time learning what his author wore and ate, and in endless pondering over some utterly unanswerable question of textual criticism, such as: "In a certain epigram," not worth reading, and which could not get into print to-day, "is a certain word seca oxsecat? The meaning will be the same, but the syntax different."8

I GATHER THE LIMBS OF OSIRIS

51

Pound had been forced to ponder these questions in a Latin proseminary in the epigrams of Martial, which was described by his depart­ ment as an "Introduction to the methods of textual and exegetical crit­ icism. . . . Practice in using the philological periodicals, and the books of reference that are most important to the teacher of Latin, as well as the dissertations and works that especially deal with epigram­ matic literature." 9 The methods of modern philology did not leave room for the consideration of the subject matter of Latin literature— much less "the beauty of the classics." In his essay on "Raphaelite Latin" Pound went on to extol the beauties of the Renaissance Latin writers, offering translations of poems by Castiglione and Camillus Capilupus, men who lived when "the Zeitgeist spoke in the Ί go to wake the dead' of Cyriac of Ancora, scholar of things old; and when Janus of Axel had forestalled and superseded the science of pedagogy with Ί instruct not; I awake.' " 1 0 These words might have served as an epigram for I Gather the Limbs of Osiris, Pound's first effort to offer a methodological alterna­ tive to the work of his teachers. In one of the later essays in the series he wrote, "I have spent six months of my life translating fifteen ex­ periments of a man living in what one of my more genial critics calls 'a very dead past.' Is this justification in anyone who is not purely a philologist?" (XI .370). And in his introduction to The Spirit of Ro­ mance Pound adamantly declared that this "book is not a philological work." Instead he explained that he had "attempted to examine cer­ tain forces, elements or qualities which were potent in the mediaeval literature of the Latin tongues, and are, I believe still potent in our own" (SR, 5). Pound was interested in uncovering a past that lives in the present. Throughout The Spirit ofRomance he makes a distinction between an "archaeological" and "artistic" interest in the past. This distinction (which would become crucial for Eliot's criticism) de­ pends on the same values as Croce's distinction between "history" and "chronicle": the historian must not simply accumulate and cate­ gorize the facts of history, but must "get some clear notion of his work in its relation to life" (SP, 138). For Pound, the historian who borrows the tools of positivism is powerless to understand the past; but the his-

52

CHAPTER 2

torian who is endowed with the magical powers of the artist may penetrate its mysteries. This artistic, antipositivist way of thinking about historical methodology becomes the foundation of the "method of Luminous Detail" outlined in IGather the Limbs of Osiris. While the positivist historian who follows the "method of multitudinous detail" accumulates vast amounts of data, Pound's ideal historian seeks those few facts that "give us intelligence of a period—a kind of intelligence not to be gathered from a great array of the other sort." So-and-so was, in such-and-such a year, elected Doge. So-andso killed the tyrant. So-and-so was banished for embezzling state funds. So-and-so embezzled but was not banished. These statements may contain germs of drama, certain suggestions of human passion of habit, but they are reticent, they tell us nothing we did not know, nothing which enlightens us. By reading them with the blanks filled in, with the names written, we get no more intimate acquaintance with the temper of any period; but when in Burckhardt we come upon this passage, "In this year the Venetians refused to make war upon the Milanese because they held that any war between buyer and seller must prove profitable to neither," we come upon a portent, the old order changes, one conception of war and of the State begins to decline. The Middle Ages imperceptibly give ground to the Renaissance. (11.130) The passage Pound quotes is from Burckhardt's chapter on "The State as a Work of Art" in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. Introducing his method of luminous detail, Pound writes that "I do not imagine that I am speaking of a method by me discovered" (11.130). Burckhardt was one of Pound's forerunners in the use of the method. Later in The Civilization of the Renaissance he offers a defense for his disregard of what Pound would call the method of multitudinous detail: The facts which we shall quote in evidence of our thesis will be few in number. Here, if anywhere in the course of this discussion, the author is conscious that he is treading on the perilous ground

I GATHER THE LIMBS OF OSIRIS

53

of conjecture, and that what seems to him a clear, if delicate and gradual, transition in the intellectual movement of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries may not be equally plain to others. The gradual awakening of the soul of a people is a phenomenon which may produce a different impression on each spectator.11 Like Burckhardt, Pound prefers to present his history in a handful of luminous details that evoke the spiritual essence of the past, the soul of a people, the imperceptible transition from one age to another. And like Burckhardt—as well as Nietzsche, Dilthey, and Croce—Pound felt that the artist is best suited to accomplish this task: "The artist seeks out the luminous detail and presents it. He does not comment. His work remains the permanent basis of psychology and metaphysics. Each historian will 'have ideas'—presumably different from other historians—imperfect deductions, varying as the fashions, but the luminous details remain unaltered" (11.130). Pound's ideal historian must possess the visionary power of the artist to intuit the spirit of the past. Given our awareness of the difficulty of understanding the past, we might find Pound's assertion of his ability to penetrate the "permanent basis" of history to be merely boastful rhetoric. But he believed in the traditionally sanctioned powers of the artist. And the new method of scholarship that he based on those powers, aversion of the historicism held in common by many thinkers during Pound's early years, underlies all his translations and poetic recreations. Returning now to Pound's translation of "The Seafarer" we can better understand it in light of Pound's rejection of positivistic historiography. Pound presented "The Seafarer" not merely as an illustration of his new method in scholarship; like the myths of the city of Tyre and the limbs of Osiris, the poem is presented as a metaphor for this methodology: Nathless there knocketh now The heart's thoughts that I on high streams The salt-wavy tumult traverse alone. Moaneth away my mind's lust That I fare forth, that I afar hence Seek out a foreign fastness. (1.107)

54

CHAPTER 2

Here is Pound himself, the expatriot, the voyager, retrieving the bounty of foreign and past traditions. Pound's interest in AngloSaxon was not what he would call "archeological." He wanted to bring a dead language to life and show how it spoke about the present. A few weeks before his "Seafarer" appeared in the New Age, Pound wrote to Dorothy Shakespear that he had met a man who struck him as a "charming relique of Temporis aet [times past], whose only anachronistic feature was his speech. He should have accommodated himself to his surroundings and spoken anglo-saxon. He had a beautiful head plagiarized from some Roman cameo—a true mystic" (PSL, 55). Pound's translation was designed to give this man speech. As he wrote in the introduction to The Spirit of Romance, he sought qualities in past poetry that are still living, still "potent" in the present. A few years later Pound recalled in Patria Mia that he had found "in 'The Seafarer' and in 'The Wanderer' trace of what I should call the English national chemical" (SP, 123). Pound saw the potency of that chemical in the living Englishman who walked beside him, and in "The Seafarer" he sought to bring its earliest expression back to life. The "true mystic" is a person who transcends the boundaries of time, and a "true mystic" is what Pound wanted to be. The reciprocal relationship established between "The Seafarer" and the prose discussion of historicism that follows it is evident throughout the remaining segments of/ Gather the Limbs of Osiris. The third segment contains five translations excerpted from Pound's The Sonnets and Ballate ofGuido Cavahanti, which was published in London early in 1912. One of these poems, Ballata V, is the luminous particular of Cavalcanti's work that Pound admired most. The ballata is a praise-song to the light within the lady's eyes, and it ends with these lines: There where this Lady's loveliness appeareth, There's heard a voice which goes before her ways And seems to sing her name with such sweet praise That my mouth fears to speak what name she beareth. And my heart trembles for the grace she weareth, While for in my soul's deep the sighs astir

I GATHER THE LIMBS OF OSIRIS

55

Speak thus: "Look well! For if you look on her Then shalt thou see her virtue risen in heaven." (III.155) In his introduction to The Sonnets and Battate ofGuido Cavalcanti (dated 15 November 1910) Pound offered an extensive commentary on the last line of this ballata, particularly its use of the word "virtue." Pater has explained its meaning in the preface to his "The Renaissance," but in reading a line like "Vedrai la sua virtu nel del salita " one must have in mind the connotations alchemical, astrological, metaphysical, which Swedenborg would have called correspondences. . . . The heavens were, according to the Ptolemaic system, clear concentric spheres with the earth as their pivot; they moved more swiftly as they were far removed from it, each one endowed with its virtue, its property for affecting man and destiny; in each its star, the sign visible to the wise and guiding them. A logical astrology, the star a sort of label of the spiritual force, an indicator of the position and movement of that spiritual current. Thus "her" presence, his Lady's, corresponds with the ascendancy of the star of that heaven which corresponds to her particular emanation or potency. (T, 18-19) In I Gather the Limbs of Osiris Pound does not offer any specific commentary on Cavalcanti's use of the word "virtue," but in the sixth segment of the work, "On Virtue," he adopts Pater's conception of criticism as the search for virtue for his own "new method of scholarship." The link to Cavalcanti's ballata is not made explicitly. Neither is Pater mentioned, but Pound relied on this passage from The Renaissance in the formulation of this "new" historicism: for the aesthetic critic, writes Pater (who uses the word "aesthete" with knowledge of the Greekaisthetes, one -whosees), the picture, the landscape, the engaging personality in life or in a book, La Gioconda, the hills of Carrara, Pico of Mirandola, are valuable for their virtues, as we say, in speaking of a herb, a wine, a gem; for the property each has of affecting one with a special, a

CHAPTER 2

56

unique, impression of pleasure. Our education becomes complete in proportion as our susceptibility to these impressions increases in depth and variety. And the function of the aesthetic critic is to dis­ tinguish, to analyse and separate its adjuncts, the virtue by which a picture, a fair personality in life or in a book, produces this special impression of beauty or pleasure, to indicate what the source of that impression is, and under what conditions it is experienced. His end is reached when he has disengaged that virtue.12 Pound's description of the search for virtue in I Gather the Limbs of Osiris has a pedigree that extends even beyond Pater. Pater borrowed the term from Wordsworth's famous evocation of "spots of time" in the twelfth book οϊ The Prelude: There are in our existence spots of time That with distinct pre-eminence retain A renovating virtue, whence, depressed By false opinion and contentious thought Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight, In trivial occupations, and the round Of ordinary intercourse, our minds Are nourished and invisibly repaired.13 Pound's use of the term after Pater and Wordsworth establishes a neat model for the continuity of nineteenth- and twentieth-century poet­ ics. Pater is indeed, as Harold Bloom has said, the hinge upon which Romantic and modern poetry turn. Pater was more important for Pound than the simple borrowing of a term would suggest; in both Pater and Yeats Pound found support for his own ideas about a "general consciousness" that links the pres­ ent with the past. For Pound, virtu (as he usually spells it, preferring the Italian because it is closer to the Latin "virtus" and avoids the moral connotations of the modern English "virtue") 14 denotes both a realm of spiritual being and the specific elements on earth that cor­ respond to that realm. In Cavalcanti's ballata, the virtu is the light in the lady's eyes that reveals her position in the heavens. In Pound's historicism, virtu functions in much the same way that "spirit" or "life"

I GATHER THE LIMBS OF OSIRIS

57

functions in Dilthey's thought: as a transhistorical spiritual world, it links all particular individuals and makes understanding possible; in its specific manifestations, it is the essence of individuality. It is clear from all Pound's early criticism that he believed in some kind of general consciousness that not only defined specific historical periods but established a continuity between past and present, the living and the dead.15 "Art is a fluid moving above or over the minds of men," he wrote in his introduction to The Spirit of Romance. Art or an art is not unlike a river, in that it is perturbed at times by the quality of the river bed, but is in a way independent of that bed. The color of the water depends upon the substance of the bed and banks immediate and preceding. Stationary objects are reflected, but the quality of motion is of the river. The scientist is concerned with all these things, the artist with that which flows. (SR, 5-6) Penetrating to a spiritual reality that the philologist disregards, the artist wants to uncover that portion of an artist or work of art that is eternal—the luminous particular—that part of the "fluid moving above or over the minds of men" that is its own. Pound did not ignore the methods of empirical science in this effort; but he thought that both the poet and the scientist dealt with "signs" that are "a door into eternity and into the boundless ether. As the abstract mathematician is to science so is the poet to the world's consciousness" (SP, 362).16 Pound's new method in scholarship is an attempt to describe something as ineffable as the world's consciousness in terms as concrete as those of the scientist. By isolating virtu, this eternal element of the past, he believes he has discovered a past that has remained living ("potent," he would say) in the present. Here is Pound's description of virtu in I Gather the Limbs of Osiris: The soul of man is compounded of all the elements of the cosmos of souls, but in each soul there is some one element which predominates, which is in some peculiar and intense way the quality or virtu of the individual; in no two souls is this the same. It is by reason of this virtu that a given work of art persists. (VI.224)

58

CHAPTER 2

Although Pound believed in a spiritual presence that enveloped all individuals, he was finally, like Dilthey, not so concerned with this abstract world of spirit as with its individual concrete manifestations. Dilthey believed that we can understand the past because we are able to project our individual "lived experience" into the experience of others. Understanding is "a rediscovery of the I in the thou." For Pound, virtu functions in much the same way: "It is the artist's business to find his own virtu" because once he has "discovered his own virtue the artist will be more likely to discern and allow for a particular virtu in others. The erection of the microcosmos consists in discriminating these other powers and in holding them in orderly arrangement about one's own" (VI.224). Like the historians who were his contemporaries, Pound did not see the historian's subjectivity as a deterrent to historical knowledge, but as a means to inject passion into a potentially deadening discipline. As Pound wrote in the first version (1917) of Canto 1, "what were the use / Of setting figures up" from the past "and breathing life upon them / Were't not our life, your life, my life, extended?"17 By emphasizing the necessity of discovering one's own virtu before investigating anyone else's, Pound was not sanctioning any kind of cavalier imposition of his own preoccupations over those of the past. In 1913 he wrote Dorothy Shakespear, No, I shouldn't say that self-analysis is egotistical—even if the epithet were opprobrious. Anyhow "know thyself is about the only way to find out about any thing or body else. . . . As for the soul being "mixed up" I dare say we've the whole divina commedia going on inside us. . . . The real meditation is, however, the meditation on one's identity. Ah, voila une chose! ! You try it. You try finding out why you're you & not somebody else. And who in the blazes you are anyhow? (PSL, 206) Because each individual contains the totality of knowledge within himself ("The soul of man is compounded of all the elements of the cosmos," Pound writes in I Gather the Limbs of Osiris), he must turn inward in order to find out anything about the world. For Pound, the

I GATHER THE LIMBS OF OSIRIS

59

very mind of the individual is a palimpsest, built from what is past, or passing, or to come. This emphasis on intensive self-knowledge as the necessary prerequisite to any knowledge about the past is probably a result of the extensive reading in mediaeval mysticism that Pound undertook in his early London years (though Emerson's shadow looms over this reading). Pound planned and abandoned a book "about philosophy from Richard St. Victor to Pico della Mirandola" (PSL, 45), and his reading of Richard of St. Victor, the twelfth-century Scottish mystic, would remain important to him throughout his entire life.18 In The Spirit of Romance he wrote that it was the "keenly intellectual mysticism of Richard of St. Victor" that fueled his fascination with the mediaeval period (SR, 22). And in his notes toPersonae (1909), his third book of poems, he explained the reason for this fascination: Ref. Richard of St. Victor. "On the preparation of the soul for contemplation," where he distinguishes between cogitation, meditation, and contemplation. In cogitation the thought or attention flits aimlessly about the subject. In meditation it circles round it, that is, it views it systematically, from all sides, gaining perspective. In contemplation it radiates from a centre, that is, as light from the sun reaches out in an infinite number of ways to things that are related to or dependent on it. The words above are my own, as I have not the Benjamin Minor by me. Following St. Victor's figure of radiation: Poetry in its acme is expression from contemplation. (CEP, 99) Pound was probably remembering a passage not from the Benjamin Minor but from the Benjamin Major in which Richard of St. Victor makes precisely this tripartite distinction in modes of thought.19 Both of Richard of St. Victor's works, however, are descriptions of the different modes of contemplation and the preparations necessary to achieve contemplation in its highest form. For Richard of St. Victor, self-knowledge is the most important stage along the contemplative

60

CHAPTER 2

way: "Would you have the privacy of the Father's secrets? Climb this mountain, learn to know thyself. He came down from heaven who said 'Know thyself.' Do you see now the importance of climbing this mountain and how useful a full knowledge of oneself may be?"20 This is the kind of self-knowledge that Pound presents as preparatory to any knowledge about the world. To pluck out the luminous detail, to isolate the virtu of a past artist, the interpreter must employ a visionary sense of the past. That is why neither the scientist nor the historian can adequately accomplish the task. Only the artist—the individual who knows his own virtu and understands his connection with "the fluid moving above or over the minds of men"—can unlock these spiritual mysteries. For Pound, not only poetry, as he wrote in his notes toPersonae, but also the new method in scholarship is "in its acme" an "expression from contemplation." When I Gather the Limbs of Osiris was appearing in the pages of the New Age, Pound was drafting "Psychology and Troubadours" (1912), an investigation of the influx of Neoplatonic mysticism into Provengal poetry. He wrote to Dorothy Shakespear about his problems with the article and she suggested that he claim to be "a re-incarnation so you know" (PSL, 61). Pound did not go quite so far, but he did claim that his analysis proceeded from a method of "visionary interpretation" which "will throw light upon events and problems other than our own" (SR, 90). Pound did not go on to explain exactly what he meant by "visionary interpretation" but he was no doubt thinking of the methods he was to outline in I Gather the Limbs of Osiris: virtu and the luminous detail. In "Psychology and Troubadours" Pound's interpretation of the chivalric love code is as imaginative in its speculation and as uninterested in conventional accuracy as one might expect a "visionary interpretation" to be: The problem, in so far as it concerns Provence, is simply this: Did this "chivalric love," this exotic, take on mediumistic properties? Stimulated by the color or quality of emotion, did that "color" take on forms interpretive of the divine order? Did it lead to an "exteriorization of the sensibility," and interpretation of the cosmos by feeling? (SR, 94)

I GATHER THE LIMBS OF OSIRIS

61

Throughout all these early essays, Pound looked to Pater and to the mediaeval Neoplatonists (whose ideas he merged in his own conception of virtu) for the methodology to replace the positivistic empiricism of his philological training. In doing so, he joined a company of thinkers (Bergson, Burckhardt, Croce, Dilthey) who at the same time were turning to artistic and mystical traditions for a new sense of the past, motivated by their sense that historical evidence had to be penetrated to discover a "deeper" reality underlying our everyday existence. Unlike these philosophers, however, Pound was interested primarily in the writing of poetry, and all this theorizing about the nature of history and interpretation was secondary to the creation of what he would come to call a "poem including history." Before I Gather the Limbs of Osiris began to appear in theNewAge in 1911, Pound had already published Canzoni, a preliminary version of the poem that would preoccupy him for his entire life.

Chapter Three

Canzoni: Toward a Poem Including History

Once Pound had completed I Gather the Limbs of Osiris he was secure enough about his new method of scholarship to make subtle distinctions between his own "historical sense" and that held by other historians and poets. In May 1913 Pound visited Venice, and he was given a ticket to a concert at the Fenice, Venice's opera house. He wrote to Dorothy Shakespear that the music was "surprisingly good" and that the whole effect [was] pleasingly 18th century—Goya, Rossini, Goldini sort of effect, delighting my sense of history—not my "historical sense"—a difference to be explained at length later if you ever ask me what it is. (PSL, 224) Pound did not explain the difference, but we can determine what he meant. This early, ambiguous formulation of his "historical sense" is implicit in all his works, and it became one of the most important tenets of modernist poetics. T. S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent" gave an academic polish to ideas that are central to the early work of Yeats, Pound, and Joyce; when we examine the essays Eliot wrote just prior to "Tradition and the Individual Talent" we can see that his work was written very much in response to the early Cantos and the first chapters of Ulysses.1 In "Tradition and the Individual Talent" Eliot outlined his own understanding of the "historical sense." A poet must not rely simply on his sense of "the pastness of the past," wrote Eliot, but on "its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with . . . the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer" (SW, 49). In "A Note on Ezra Pound," published one year before "Tradition and the Individual Talent," Eliot revealed how his own idea of the "historical sense" was gleaned from Pound. "A large part of the poet's 'inspiration,' " wrote Eliot,

CANZONI

63

must come from reading and from his knowledge of history. I mean history widely taken; any cultivation of the historical sense, of perception of our position relative to the past, and in particular of the poet's relation to poets of the past. Mr. Pound's extensive knowledge of literature is one important thing, his particular passion for a minute knowledge of Proven5al is another. What has mattered is not simply that he has by insight and labour got the spirit of ProvenQal, or of Chinese, or of Anglo-Saxon, as the case may be; but that he has made masterpieces, some of translation, some of recreation, by his perception of the relation of these periods and languages to the present; of what they have that we want; and this perception of relation involves an organized view of the whole course of European poetry from Homer.2 Pound is Eliot's ideal poet of "Tradition and the Individual Talent": he works, as Eliot rephrased it in the later essay, not simply with a sense of a few isolated moments in the past, but with a sense of his position relative to "the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer." This is the distinction Pound implies in his letter to Dorothy Shakespear: his night at the opera transported him into one moment in the eighteenth century (exciting his "sense of history"), but it did not give him that more necessary sense of his own position relative to the entire course of history (his "historical sense"). Pound emphasizes this distinction again inPatriaMia when he diagnoses the problem with his graduate training in philology: "The graduate student is not taught to think of his own minute discoveries in relation to his subject as a whole. If his subject happen to be the history of an art he is scarce likely ever to have considered his work in relation to the life ofthatart"(SP,138). In his letter to Dorothy Shakespear Pound begins to let his "historical sense" operate upon his momentary transportation into the past, bringing that one single piece of knowledge into relation with "his subject as a whole." Beginning with an allusion to Browning, he juxtaposes that isolated moment with other points in time. "I shouldn't have been in the least surprised," Pound continues in his description of the Fenice,

CHAPTER 3

64

to see Browning or Verdi looking down, "to where Rossini sits Silent in his stall". (PSL, 224) Here Pound connects his own vision of Rossini's Venice with Browning's perspective on that time. The lines he quotes are from Browning's "Bishop Blougram's Apology," where the speaker of the poem, a Victorian churchman, sees among the "million imbeciles" of his congregation "some dozen men of sense" who question his faith. He then compares these few with Rossini, who sat silent in the midst of an applauding audience at the premier of one of Verdi's operas: Like Verdi when, at his worst opera's end, (The thing they gave at Florence,—What's its name?) While the mad houseful's plaudits near out-bang His orchestra of salt-box, tongs and bones, He looks through all the roaring and the wreaths Where sits Rossini patient in his stall.3 Although he no longer refers to the concert at the Fenice after this quotation of Browning, Pound moves on in three skittish paragraphs to discuss Hilda Doolittle, Yeats's "The Grey Rock" ("very fine—but his syntax is getting obscurer than Browning's"), Rabindranath Tagore, Voltaire, and an eighteenth-century translation of Petronius. Pound's "historical sense" is in high gear; the letter reveals what Eliot would call Pound's sense of "the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer." These quick, transitionless juxtapositions of different moments from the past anticipate the structure of his later poetry. Pound's "historical sense" leads him to construct a palimpsest-like frame from his momentary "sense of history," and the letter foreshadows the historical perspective of the final version of Canto 1, where he filters his own translation of a Renaissance Latin translation of Homer through the Anglo-Saxon rhythms of "The Seafarer." By 1913 Pound's ideas about history were sophisticated if not yet organized into a program for a long "poem including history."4 Late in his life, however, Pound recalled that he had "various schemes" for a long poem "starting in 1904 or 1905."5 One of these schemes is hid-

CANZONI

65

den in his sixth volume of poetry, Canzoni (1911). After the book was published, he wrote Dorothy Shakespear, I realize it's a bit confusing. The masterpiece was to have been the table of contents but some of the poems got on my nerves 8c I cut out 15 pages of 'em at the last minute. I tried to get an arrangement that would do a little of what Hugo botched in his Legende des Siecles. Artistically speaking its supposed to be a sort of chronological table of emotions: Provence, Tuscany, the Renaissance, the XVIII, the XIX, centuries, external modernity (cut out) subjective modernity, finis. . . . I don't suppose any body'll see it—the table of contents—in this light but when my biographers unearth this missive it will be recorded as an astounding proof of my genius. (PSL, 3738) Canzoni was originally to have included five additional poems with notes, and when these poems are restored to the truncated volume, the rough outlines of a poem including history become clear.6 Canzoni is an astounding proof of the tenacity of Pound's genius. The plan for Canzoni was important enough that Pound remembered it when Elkin Mathews, his publisher, asked him to cut sixteen poems from Lustra (1916). He implored Mathews to "think of the book as a whole," and he wondered if he had ruined Canzoni by abandoning the schema: This shaping up a book is very important. It is almost as important as the construction of a play or novel. I neglected it in "Canzoni" and the book has never had the same measure of success as the others. It is not so good as the others. I was affected by hyper-aesthesia or over-squeamishness and cut out the rougher poems. I don't know that I regret it in that case for the poems weren't good enough, but even so the book would have been better if they had been left in, or if something like them had been put in their place. (PJ, 285) If we take Pound's advice and restore the deleted poems to Canzoni, we can see that the book was designed as a programmatic expression of Pound's historical sense.

66

CHAPTER 3

After publishing installments of the poem in 1859 and 1877, Victor Hugo completed La Legende des siecles, Pound's model for Canzoni, in 1883. The poem consists of a sequence of "petites epopees," which, as Hugo states in his 1859 preface, present "empreintes successives du profil humain, de date en date, depuis Eve, mere des hommes, jusqu'a la Revolution, mere des peuples" [successive imprints of the human profile, from date to date, from Eve, mother of man, to the Revolution, mother of peoples].7 Mindful of Poe's dictum that "a long poem is, in fact, merely a succession of brief ones," Pound would have approved of Hugo's method.8 But La Legende was probably "botched" in Pound's mind because it is composed of primarily narrative rather than lyric poems. Its excessive length also would have bothered Pound; like the historians Pound criticizes in I Gather the Limbs of Osiris, Hugo follows "the method of multitudinous detail." Pound prefers "the method of Luminous Detail," and Canzoni presents its history in a brief sequence of poems that are meant to provide "a kind of intelligence not to be gathered from a great array of facts." In La Legende des siechs Hugo offers an idiosyncratic survey of man's spiritual development: beginning with the garden of Eden, he skips ancient Greece and Rome, lingers over the Middle Ages, stops briefly in the Renaissance, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and arrives for an extended visit in the nineteenth century. Pound's schema follows a similar pattern: he concentrates his attention on the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century (see my chart of the table of contents of Canzoni on p. 67). It is important to remember that the structure of Canzoni is not as schematic as my application of Pound's list of historical periods to the table of contents would imply; Pound was not as interested in a precise presentation of history as he was in expressing a more impressionistic "chronological table of emotions" (PSL, 37). Most of the transitions from one period to another are more gradual, and the relationship of several poems to their placement in the schema is ambiguous if not inexplicable. A poem about ancient Egyptian spirits, "De Aegypto," and a translation from Propertius, "Prayer for his Lady's Life," appear around the eighteenth century. The Propertius translation may be placed at this point because the first English translations of Propertius were made in the

CANZONI

67

Canzoni (page numbers refer to CoIUcted Early Poems) Provence Canzon: The Yearly Slain Canzon: The Spear Canzon: To be Sung Beneath a Window Canzon: Oflncense Tuscany Canzone: Of Angels To Our Lady of Vicarious Atonement To Guido Cavalcanti Sonnet in Tenzone Sonnet: Chi έ Questa? fiallata, Fragment Canzon: The Vision Renaissance Octave Sonnet Ballatetta Madngale EraMea Threnos The Tree Paracelsus in Excelsis 18th Century De Aegypto Li bel Chasteus Prayer for his Lady's Life 19th Century Speech for Psyche 'Blandula, Tenulla, Vagula' Erat Hora Epigrams La Nuvoletta Rosa Sempiterna The Golden Sestina Rome Her Monument, the Image Cut Thereon Victorian Eclogues A Prologue Maestro di Tocar Ana Levona External Modernity To Hulme (T. E.) and Fitzgerald (A Certain) Song in the Manner of Housman Redondillas, or Something of That Sort Subjective Modernity Translations from Heine Und Drang

133 134 136 137 139 14] 142 142 143 144 144 146 146 147 147 148 30* 35* 148 37* 28* 149 149 150 150 151 151 152 152 154 154 156 159 162 162 163/213** 214** 163 215** 164 167

* Poems reprinted from A Lume Spento **Poems cut from the proofs (the third sonnet of "Levoria" was retained as "L'art")

68

CHAPTER 3

eighteenth century.9 Likewise, "La Nuvoletta," translated from Dante, may be placed in the nineteenth century to document that century's enthusiasm for mediaeval literature. Pound could have learned this technique of juxtaposition from Hugo: in La Legende Hugo expresses the spirit of the classical revival of the Renaissance in "Le Satyre," a Greek idyl that makes no reference to the Renaissance itself. The placement of other poems is even more obscure. "The Golden Sestina," translated from Pico della Mirandola, and "Rome," translated from du Bellay, are situated in the middle of the nineteenth century. Pound's "historical sense" offers a possible explanation for the placement of these poems. His concern with virtu, the permanent part of a work of art, tends to level a chronological conception of history. Although each age has its distinctive form of virtu, the permanent world of virtu is beyond the realm of historical change. "All ages are contemporaneous," he wrote in The Spirit ofRomance. It is B.C., let us say, in Morocco. The Middle Ages are in Russia. The future stirs already in the minds of the few. This is especially true of literature, where the real time is independent of the apparent, and where many dead men are our grandchildren's contemporaries, while many of our contemporaries have been already gathered into Abraham's bosom, or some more fitting receptacle. (SR, 6) When he constructed his "chronological schema of emotions" in Canzoni, Pound's sense that "real time is independent of the apparent" could have led him to place "The Golden Sestina" and "Rome" in the nineteenth century because he felt that these poems express emotions that are far ahead of their time. Throughout Canzoni Pound's sense that in some way "all ages are contemporaneous" conflicts directly with his designs for a "chronological table of emotions." Hugo wrote that his Legende des sticks expresses "un seul et immense mouvement d'ascension vers la Iumiere" [a single and immense ascension toward the light].10 In contrast, the movement from period to period in Pound's schema does not imply historical progress or decline. In Patria Mia Pound wrote that in the study of history, "One wants to find out what sort of things en-

CANZONl

69

dure, . . . what sort of things recur" (SP, 125). Canzoni is a record of what endures, and consequently it is not so much an expression of what Pound calls his "sense of history" as it is of his "historical sense." The poems are positioned in the schema not simply to evoke one particular moment in the past; more often, they are placed in order to express the continuities between several moments in time— what endures through the centuries of historical change. "Rome" provides a good example of this paradigm. Pound was aware that the poem had a long history: "DuBellay translated Navgherius into French, and Spenser translated du Bellay's adaptations into English," he wrote in "The Tradition" (1914; LE, 92).11 By situating his own translation of du Bellay's poem in the nineteenth century and by prefacing it with a quotation from Propertius that invokes the Virgilian idea of Rome as a second Troy ("Troica Roma resurges"), Pound creates an aura of self-contained historical references that overrides the chronological schema. Furthermore, the poem itself is about what endures in the passage of time: "That which stands firm in thee Time batters down,/And that which fleeteth doth outrun swift time" (CEP, 154). "Rome" appears in the more complicated latter half of Canzoni; the first half of the schema is not as ambiguous or complicated as the placement of "Rome" or "Prayer for his Lady's Life" would suggest. Throughout Provence, Tuscany, and the Renaissance, the transitions from period to period are made quite clear by the formal characteristics of the poems. Pound wrote in "Troubadours: Their Sorts and Conditions" (1913) that "any study of European poetry is unsound if it does not commence with a study of that art in Provence" (LE, 101). Canzoni, unlike The Cantos, is a primarily literary history of man, and it begins with four poems based on the Provengal forms of Daniel, Rudel, and Vidal.12 But Pound wanted these four canzoni to do more than express the particular emotions of Provence. In his notes to these poems he wrote, The canzoni have already been assailed and on this account [I] feel that I may be permitted to venture toward that dangerous thing, an explanation: or rather I ask you to consider whether it be not more

CHAPTER 3

70

difficult to serve that love of Beauty (or, even of some particular sort of Beauty) which belongs to the permanent part of oneself, than to express some sudden emotion or perception which being unusual, being keener than normal, is by its very way of being, clearly defined or at least set apart from those things of the mind among which it appears. The canzone is to me rather a ritual, the high mass, if you will, of poetry, than its prayer in secret. (CEP, 305) Pound's Provence is the very embodiment of the permanent world; his Provengal canzoni are meant to express not individual conceptions of love and truth but their eternal forms. They are rituals, the incantation of the "fluid moving above or over the minds of men," which Pound will trace through the Renaissance to his modern world. In the second of the Provengal canzoni, "Canzon: The Spear," the light of this permanent world shines brightly. Pound praises a courtly lady: The light within her eyes, which slays Base thoughts and stilleth troubled waters, Is like the gold where sunlight plays Upon the still o'ershadowed waters, When anger is there mingled There comes a keener gleam instead, Like flame that burns beneath thin jade. (CEP, 136) This beatific light within the lady's eyes is her virtu, the permanent part of her soul. In his introduction to his Cavalcanti translations Pound wrote that in the Ptolemaic conception of the universe, each sphere of the heavens is "endowed with its virtue, its property for affecting man and destiny; in each its star, the sign visible to the wise and guiding them." The Provengal lady's presence "corresponds with the ascendancy of the star of that heaven which corresponds to her particular emanation or potency" (T, 19). Pound had these correspondences between the divine and earthly worlds in mind throughout Canzoni. His history of the interaction of these worlds is expressed by the fluctuating light of virtu.

CANZONI

71

In the group of poems that compose Tuscany in Pound's schema, this Neoplatonic mysticism becomes more explicit and the light shines brightly. His Tuscan poems are more precisely visionary than his Provengal canzoni, more philosophical, and no longer focused on a specific lady. In The Spirit ofRomance Pound wrote that "the tradition of Provence was being continued in Tuscany," but in Tuscany, "the art of the Troubadours [met] with philosophy at Bologna and a new era of lyric poetry [was] begun" (SR, 101). He probably chose to imitate the rhyme scheme of Dante's "Voi che intendo il terzo ciel movete" in "Canzone: Of Angels," the first Tuscan poem in Canzoni, because Dante used this particular poem in the second book of the Convivio to illustrate his own transition from praise of Beatrice to praise of Lady Philosophy. The literature of Tuscany grew naturally from Provence, but the Renaissance, in Pound's eyes, witnessed the birth of a new historical sense, a self-conscious use of the past: "The cult of Provence was. . . a cult of the emotions; that of Tuscany a cult of the harmonies of the mind. The cult of the Renaissance was a cult of culture" (SR, 223). Beginning with the Renaissance, Pound diverts the emphasis of Canzoni from direct expressions or visions of virtu to discussions about the search for the virtu of the past. "The Renaissance is not a time, but a temperament" (SR, 166), wrote Pound, and each age that follows the Renaissance in Pound's schema is characterized by its ability to sustain the temperament of the Renaissance—its ability to perceive the virtu of the past. Consequently, Pound's expression of his own "historical sense" becomes more prominent, and the relationship of the poems to their position in the schema becomes more complex. The nineteenth century begins in Canzoni with the critic who wrote the golden book about the spirit of the Renaissance: Pater. "Speech for Psyche in the Golden Book of Apuleius" is based on Pater's translation of the tale of Cupid and Psyche in Apuleius's Golden Ass (second century A.D.). Pater's Marius calls "Cupid and Psyche" his "Golden book," and Wilde, following Pater, gave The Renaissance the same name. Like "Canzone: Of Angels" or "The Tree," "Speech for Psyche" depicts the intersection of the permanent and the ephemeral, the meeting of gods with men:

72

CHAPTER 3

All night, and as the wind lieth among The cypress trees, he lay, Nor held me save as air that brusheth by one Close, and as the petals of flowers in falling Waver and seem not drawn to earth, so he Seemed over me to hover light as leaves And closer me than air, And music flowing through me seemed to open Mine eyes upon new colours. O wings, what wind can match the weight of him! (CEP, 149) Just as Cupid, mortal Psyche's spirit-lover, opens her "eyes upon new colours," the poem vibrates with a newly discovered vision of the past. In The Spirit of Romance Pound isolates Apuleius's "Cupid and Psyche" (in Pater's translation) as the first anticipation of the spirit of Provensal literature. By looking back to Pater, "Speech for Psyche" looks back to Provence, the embodiment of the eternal values in Pound's schema, the source of the "fluid moving above or over the minds of men." Like "Rome" and Pound's letter about the Fenice, "Speech for Psyche" looks forward to the palimpsest-like method of Canto 1. So begins a poem including history. "Redondillas, or Something of that Sort," deleted from the proof's, is the longest poem expressing the emotions of "external modernity." Unlike the introspective poems of "subjective modernity" that follow it, "Redondillas" adopts the best oratorical manner of Whitman and Tennyson. In the proofs, the poem's original title is "Locksley Hall, fifty years further" and the cancelled notes tell us that "Fifty years ago one would have called this effusion 'the age.' " The poem begins, I sing the gaudy to-day and cosmopolite civilization Of my hatred of crudities, of my weariness of banalities, I sing of the ways that I love, of Beauty and delicate savours. (CEP, 215) "Redondillas" is a long catalogue of what Pound would sing if his age would allow him. "They tell me in 'Mirror my Age,'" he writes, "God pity the age if I do do it." Faced with the debased spirituality of his time, Pound wants to assert his belief "in some lasting sap I at work

CANZONI

73

in the trunk of things" (CEP, 218, 217). He is fighting to retain the principles around which Canzoni itself is organized. In the most lyrical passage of "Redondillas" Pound asserts again that Still is there something greater, some power, some recognition, Some bond beyond the ordinary bonds of passion and sentiment And the analyzed method of novels, some saner and truer course That pays us for foregoing blindness. Whenever we dare, the angels crowd about us. (CEP, 218) This is, as Pound shows in "Canzone: Of Angels" and says in "Und Drang," what "Provence knew." The modern poet needs his vision of the heavens as much as Dante or Milton. In "Redondillas" Pound confides that "There is more in heaven and earth / Than the priest and the scientists think o f (CEP, 219). "Und Drang," the major poem of "subjective modernity," reveals the glimpses of the heavens that are possible in Pound's modern world. The first six poems of "Und Drang," like "Redondillas," depict the spiritual degeneracy and moral confusion of Edwardian England. It is a world where nothing lasts: All things in season and no thing o'er long! Love and desire and gain and good forgetting, Thou canst not stay the wheel, hold none too long! See, and the very sense of what we know Dodges and hides as in a sombre curtain Bright threads leap forth, and hide, and leave no pattern. (CEP, 169,170) Echoing Tennyson's world-weary Ulysses, Pound asks, Confusion, clamour, 'mid the many voices Is there a meaning, a significance? (CEP, 168)

74

CHAPTER 3

In the second half of "Und Drang" Pound answers this question affirmatively. "The House of Splendour," seventh in the sequence, returns once more to Pater, and through Pater to Apuleius and Provence. Borrowing the language of Pater's version of "Cupid and Psyche,"13 Pound describes a house built "somewhere beyond the worldly ways." Inside this house of light lives Pound's eternal lady: Here am I come perforce my love of her, Behold mine adoration Makest me clear, and there are powers in this Which, played on by the virtues of her soul, Break down the four-square walls of standing time. (CEP, 171) Canzoni begins with a vision of beatific beauty and establishes that vision as the eternal element to be traced throughout the centuries. Here, in the twentieth century, the vision returns, breaks down the walls of time, and offers stable meaning to a fleeting world of clamor and confusion. Pound makes this return to the eternal values of Provence even clearer in "The Flame," the eighth part of "Und Drang," when he writes that love is "not a game that plays at mates and mating, / Provence knew" (CEP, 171). In "Psychology and Troubadours" (1912) Pound writes that "the types which joined these [mystical] cults survived, in Provence, and survive today—priests, maenads, and the rest—though there is in our society no provision for them" (SR, 95). Pound is describing his own predicament: though he wants to assert the power of what "Provence knew" in the twentieth century, he realizes that such knowledge must take a new form. "Levoria" shows the danger of the mindless repetition of the conventions of the courtly tradition; in this sequence of four sonnets, Pound writes that "The well-groomed sonnet is to truth preferred" (CEP, 213). Consequently, in "Aujardin," the final poem in "Und Drang," Pound tempers his vision of the lady in "The House of Splendour." "Au Jardin" is a riposte to Yeats's "The Cap and Bells" from The Wind Among the Reeds (1899). Although Pound considered Yeats the last of the "great critics" and the "greatest living poet," he began to grow dissatisfied (as did Yeats himself) with the voices whispering

CANZONl

75

among the reeds. Yeats is the major poet of what Pound calls "subjective modernity" in his schema. In "Status Rerum" (1913) Pound reaffirmed Yeats's status as "the greatest of living poets" but pointed out that Mr. Yeats has been subjective; he believes in the glamour and associations which hang near the words. "Works of art beget works of art." He has much in common with the French symbolists. Mr. Hueffer believes in an exact rendering of things. He would strip words of all "association" for the sake of getting a precise meaning. He professes to prefer prose to verse. You would find his origins in Gautier or in Flaubert. He is objective.14 Beginning as a disciple of Yeats, Pound's early verse was equally "subjective." But in "Au Jardin," the last poem in both "Und Drang" and Canzoni, Pound pushes past the subjective, symbolist method of "The House of Splendour" and "The Flame" to what Pound might have called the "objective modernity" of Ford Madox Hueffer (Ford) and Flaubert. In "The Cap and Bells," Yeats sings of a jester who dies of unrequited love, leaving his lady his cap and bells. In "Au Jardin" Pound recreates the scenario of Yeats's poem and quotes its first line: 0 you away high there, you that lean From amber lattices upon the cobalt night, 1 am below amid the pine trees, Amid the little pine trees, hear me! "The jester walked in the garden." Did he so? Well, there's no use your loving me That way, Lady; For I've nothing but songs to give you. (CEP, 174) Here, Pound is unwilling to adopt the stance of the courtly lover; though he wants to keep the tradition of Provence alive, he knows that the tradition must be made new in order to live. He realizes that he cannot continue to write poems of praise to a lady in the manner of either "Canzon: The Yearly Slain" or "The House of Splendour."

76

CHAPTER 3

These poems are Pound's recreation of the form virtu took in Provence and in the 1890s. Alone, they are momentary expressions of Pound's "sense of history," but within the schema ofCanzoni, they are nodes in the structure of his "historical sense." "Und Drang" summarizes and evaluates the history that Canzoni traces from Provence to modernity, and its final poems promise the Imagist work Pound would publish in Ripostes (1912), the first volume in which a "modernized" Pound emerges. The whole ofCanzoni ends in the place where The Cantos begins. Like Three Cantos (1917), "Und Drang" returns to Lake Garda: Sapphire Benacus, in thy midst and thee Nature herselfs turned metaphysical, Who can look on that blue and not believe? (CEP, 172) "Benacus" is the Latin name for Lake Garda, Pound's Olympus, the dwelling place of his gods. Thinking of Sirmione, the tiny peninsula that juts into the lake, the home of Catullus, Pound wrote in "Prolegomena" (1912) that "I would much rather lie on what is left of Catullus' parlour floor and speculate the azure beneath it and the hills off to SaIo and Riva with their forgotten gods moving unhindered amongst them, than discuss any processes and theories of art whatsoever" (LE, 9). Pound began Three Cantos with a vision of those gods, "patched with histories," that hover about that place, and they are also "living . . . and firm of aspect" in Canzoni, an earlier attempt at a poem including history.15 In Canzoni Pound's values lie in what is permanent, what endures or recurs throughout history. In his examination of The Cantos as a poem including history, Michael Bernstein has written that "one of the major dilemmas in The Cantos arises directly from the tension between the historical and mythological codes."16 This tension between the historical world of man and the permanent world of the gods is already felt in Canzoni. Although Pound organized the book around a chronological schema, the most interesting parts of Canzoni occur when a poem seems at odds with its placement in the structure. These poems, such as "Rome" or "Speech for Psyche," contain a whole his-

CANZONI

77

tory in themselves, and they express what endures in history without depending on a chronological conception of time for their meaning. La Legende des siecles wasfinallynot the best model for Pound's first poem including history. While Pound had worked out a sophisticated existential historicism, Hugo's poem is based on an idea of history similar to that of Hegel or Michelet. While Pound's view of history entailed the belief that "all ages are contemporaneous," Hugo understood history as "un seul et immense mouvement d'ascension vers la lumiere." He described La Legende in his preface to the poem as L'epanouissement du genre humain de siecle en siecle, l'homme montant des tenebres a l'ideal, la transfiguration paradisiaque de 1'enfer terrestre, l'eclosion lente et supreme de la liberie, droit pour cette vie, responsibilite pour l'autre; une espece d'hymne religieux a mille strophes, ayant dans ses entrailles une foi profonde et sur son sommet une haute priere; Ie drame de Ia creation eclaire par Ie visage du createur, voila ce que sera, termine, ce poeme dans son ensemble; si Dieu, maitre des existences humaines, y consent. [The blossoming of the human race from century to century, man rising from darkness to the ideal, the transformation of earthly hell into paradise, the slow and supreme birth of liberty, rights for this life and responsibilities for the next; a kind of religious hymn with a thousand stanzas, holding in its entrails a profound faith and at its summit, a lofty prayer; the drama of creation illuminated by the visage of the creator; that is what this poem will be when completed; if God, the master of human existences, consents to it.]17 Hugo's conception of history is based upon a teleology that the existential historian rejects. That ideological view of history was shared by most of Hugo's contemporaries, however. In his Histoire de France (1833-1855) Michelet depicts the history of the French people as the progressive unfolding of the human potential for liberty. Like Hugo, Michelet saw the realization of the ideal in the French Revolution. Both men were disillusioned by the Reign of Terror, but each felt that the people's craving for the light of freedom could overcome any obstacle.

78

CHAPTER 3

Pound brought different expectations to historical knowledge than Hugo or Michelet. Exasperated with the nineteenth century's "historical sense," Nietzsche wrote in The Use and Abuse ofHistory that man's obsession with the past was preventing him from living in the present. Progress was a dead issue for Nietzsche. He suggested that the historian adopt an "antihistorical" point of view and disregard the past, or adopt a "super-historical" stance and turn his eyes "from the process of becoming to that which gives existence an eternal and stable character—to art and religion."18 In Canzoni Pound adopts the super-historical point of view; he searches for the eternal element in art, the element of the past still relevant to life in the present. Yet the chronological schema in Canzoni remains at odds with this point of view. While individual poems such as "Rome" grow from Pound's historicism, the structure of the volume does not. In the long poems that follow Canzoni, "Near Perigord" (1914) and Three Cantos (1917), Pound no longer requires a chronological schema to include history in a poem. These poems are consciously antichronological, and they find their focus in the difficulties Pound confronted when trying to understand the past from the perspective of the present. In "Near Perigord" Pound discovered a poetic vehicle for the historicism he outlined in I Gather the Limbs of Osiris.

Chapter Four

The Perigord Phantastikon

In "Psychology and Troubadours," the lecture on mediaeval mysticism that Pound wrote for G.R.S. Mead's theosophical Quest Society in 1912, Pound used the word phantastihn to describe the workings of an individual's consciousness. Some people's minds seem "to rest, or to have [their] center more properly, in what the Greek psychologists called the phantastikon. Their minds are, that is, circumvolved about them like soap-bubbles reflecting sundry patches of the macrocosmos" (SR, 92). As Pound uses the term, it becomes clear that he allows it to refer not only to the consciousness of an individual but the consciousness of an entire age. In I Gather the Limbs of Osiris he isolates four "phases of consciousness" by examining the virtu of four representative individuals: Homer, Dante, Chaucer, and Shakespeare (VI.224). Because an individual's consciousness contains the entire "macrocosmos" in which he lives, Homer can stand for the ancient Greeks, Dante for Tuscany. Canzoni, Pound's history of emotions, is built around this principle. In "Psychology and Troubadours" Pound is concerned with the consciousness, the phantastikon, of Provence and Tuscany: "In the Trecento the Tuscans are busy with their phantastikon. In Provence we may find preparation for this, or we may find faint reliqua of the other [Greek] consciousness; though one misses the pantheon" (SR, 93). In the letter I have already cited to illustrate Pound's emphasis on the necessity of self-knowledge as preparation for any knowledge about the world, Pound also uses the word phantastikon: No, I shouldn't say that self-analysis is egotistical—even if the epithet were opprobrious. Anyhow "know thyself is about the only way to find out about any thing or body else. Neither did I mean that the objective is "The real" except in comparison with inductions from the objective, i.e. notions, ideas (of a sort), opinions. As

80

CHAPTER 4

for the soul being "mixed up" I dare say we've the whole divina commedia going on inside us. Yeats rather objects to cells being intelligent, but, I think the 'Paradiso' is a fair stab at presenting a developed "phantastikon." The real meditation is, however, the meditation on one's identity. Ah, voila une chose!! You try it. You try finding out why you're you & not somebody else. And who in the blazes you are anyhow? Ah voila une chose! I can give you "Mantua" if its any use to you, & perhaps "Perigord." (PSL, 206) For Pound, the Divine Comedy is a presentation of the macrocosmos of Dante's Mantuan phantastikon. And it is this phantastikon, along with that of Perigord (the region in southern France where the Troubadours flourished) that Pound feels he has penetrated and made a part of his own consciousness. To help Dorothy Shakespear understand her own consciousness, Pound offers the phantastikons of Mantua and Perigord for contrast. When Pound wrote this letter in April 1913 he was particularly interested in the phantastikon of the troubadours in Perigord. A few weeks later he wrote his father that he had finished "the Patria Mia, book, for Seymour and [was] doing a tale of Bertrans de Born" (L, 21). This is the first time Pound refers to "Near Perigord," the investigation of the Perigord phantastikon that he would publish in December 1915. This poem, along with one closely linked to it, "Provincia Deserta" (first published in March 1915), are Pound's first successful expressions of his historicism in his poetry. Unlike Canzoni these poems do not rely on a chronological schema, but instead focus on the act of historical interpretation. History becomes a function of the act of historical understanding in these poems, and all ages become truly contemporaneous, woven into the tissue of the present. In these poems, Pound worked out the implications of the historical sense that would carry him through the early Cantos. Like "Near Perigord," "Provincia Deserta" is an investigation of the Perigord phantastikon, and it grew from a walking tour Pound took through Provence in 1912. The poem is also, like I Gather the Limbs of Osiris, a reaction against the philological methods of turn-ofthe-century scholarship. As Peter Makin has noted in his study of Pro-

THE PERIGORD PHANTASTIKON

81

vence and Pound, "from its beginnings, Provengal scholarship has had a strong current of positivist scepticism, a belief that only the provable should be taken into account. The content of the poem was too 'subjective' for satisfactory discussion."1 In contrast, "Provincia Deserta" enacts the process of "visionary interpretation" that Pound describes in his prose. As it enacts this process, the poem follows the shape of the "greater romantic lyric" typified by Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" or Yeats's "Among School Children." "Provincia Deserta," observes Hugh Witemeyer, "attempts to recreate history through a traditional technique of English meditative poetry. . . . The main difference is that in Pound's poem the heart of the meditation is not personal insight or resolution but the imaginative penetration and recreation of history."2 I would alter Witemeyer's fine analysis of the poem only by saying that for the early Pound, "personal insight" and the "recreation of history" cannot be separated. They are ultimately the same thing because insight into the past is necessarily a development from personal experience; Pound said he had to discover his own virtu before he could isolate anyone else's. I would also add that I think it doubtful that Pound modeled "Provincia Deserta" on any of the "greater romantic lyrics" (and the fact that the poem follows this pattern reveals how the "greater romantic lyric" enacts a contemplative process that is part of human psychology—not simply a literary template). A more telling inspiration for the organizing principle of "Provincia Deserta" may be found in Pound's reading in historiography. At about the same time that he published the poem in Poetry, he brought out another installment of his translations of the Japanese Noh plays in Drama. In his notes for "Suma Genji" Pound comments on the recurrence of the "genius loci"—the spirit of the place—throughout the plays. When the spirit of Genji appears in "Suma Genji," the chorus dubs him "the soul of the place," and Pound adds that the line could be rendered more precisely as " 'He became the place.' You can compare this with Buckle, or with Jules Romains' studies in unanimism" (T, 236).3 Pound made neither of these comparisons in his comments on the Noh, but he did combine the traditional idea of the spirit of the place

82

CHAPTER 4

with the historiography of Henry Thomas Buckle in "Provincia Deserta." Buckle, as we have seen, was a nineteenth-century positivist historian, but it was not Buckle's belief that historical events were governed by identifiable laws that interested Pound. Pound saw a corrective to the philologist's tendency to ignore a poem's connection to lived experience in Buckle's assertion that human civilization is "most powerfully influenced" by "physical agents," which "may be classed under four heads: namely, Climate, Food, Soil, and the General Aspect of Nature." By "the General Aspect of Nature" Buckle meant "those appearances which, though presented chiefly to the sight, have, through the medium of that or other senses, directed the associations of ideas, and hence in different countries have given rise to different habits of national thought."4 In 1912 Pound set out on his walking tour of Provence to experience first-hand the physical sensations that gave rise to the habits of the troubadours. He found the conditions not completely favorable: "This country abounds in heat Sc is not devoid of fleas. I have done everything except the little stretch between Le Pui [Le Puy] Sc Clermont [Clermont-Ferrand], and am rather worn with the job" (PSL, 131). As he walked these miles, however, Pound did manage to write several chapters of what he soon called Gironde, a prose study of the troubadours and their conditions. He later abandoned the study when Ford Madox Ford told him it was "as bad as [Robert Louis] Stevenson" (PSL, 155), but Pound then used the material he had collected during the walking tour in "Provincia Deserta," a poem that invokes the spirits of the places he had visited. "Provincia Deserta" begins with Pound's memories of the landscape of southern France; then, standing among these remnants of the past, "thinking of old days," Pound's landscape suddenly comes alive with the spirit of twelfth-century Provence: I have seen the torch-flames, high-leaping, Painting the front of that church; Heard, under the dark, whirling laughter. I have looked back over the stream and seen the high building, Seen the long minarets, the white shafts. (P, 121-122)

THE PERIGORD PHANTASTIKON

83

After this almost nightmarish vision of the past, Pound senses the presence of the spirits of Richard the Lionhearted, Arnaut de Mareuil, and Bertran de Born. At the climax of the poem, he recreates the story of Peire and Austors de Maensac: I have thought of the second Troy, Some little prized place in Auvergnat: Two men tossing a coin, one keeping a castle, One set on the highway to sing. He sang a woman. Auvergne rose to the song; The Dauphin backed him. "The Castle to Austors!" "Pieire kept the singing— "A fair man and a pleasant." He won the lady, Stole her away for himself, kept her against armed force: So ends that story. (P, 122-123) In "Troubadours: Their Sorts and Conditions" (an essay, published in 1913, that grew out of the discarded Gironde), Pound offers a prose summary of this story, interspersing quotations from his source (the late Provengal vida or life of Peire de Maensac) with his own commentary: "Piere de Maensac was of Alverne (Auvergne) a poor knight, and he had a brother named Austors de Maensac, and they both were troubadours and they both were in concord that one should take the castle and the other the trobar." And presumably they tossed up a marabotin or some such obsolete coin, for we read, "And the castle went to Austors and the poetry to Piere, and he sang of the wife of Bernart de Teirci. So much he sang of her and so much he honoured her that it befell that the lady let herself go gay (furaradel). And he took her to the castle of the Dalfin of Auvergne, and the husband, in the manner of the golden Menelaus, demanded her much, with the church to back him and with the great war that they made." (LE, 96-97)

CHAPTER 4

84

Comparing this version of the story with the one Pound recreates in "Provincia Deserta," we can see how much of the tale is derived from historical record and how much from Pound's imagination. The most concrete and vivid details—the "Two men tossing a coin," for instance—are Pound's invention. He does not merely recount the evidence, but lets the facts "vibrate in his mind," as Croce would say, fleshing out the remnants of the past with his imagination. What Croce would have called a "chronicle" is fleshed out to make a true "history." Neither the present nor the narrator "disappears entirely," as Witemeyer maintains, in this contemplation of the past. Inspired by the vida writer's reference to Menelaus, Pound presents the entire imagined scene as a "second Troy," complete with a Provengal Paris and Helen. Like the more complicated poems in Canzoni, "Provincia Deserta" is not merely an expression of Pound's "sense of history" (not merely, that is, a recreation of a moment in the past) but of his "historical sense" (through which several moments from the past are combined in the present, mingled in the consciousness of the poet-historian). Unlike the poems oiCanzoni, "Provincia Deserta" presents the entire meditative process through which these connections are made. At the end of his recreation of Peire de Maensac, Pound pulls away from the scene, separating the strands of past and present that he has woven together: That age is gone; Pieire de Maensac is gone. I have walked over these roads; I have thought of them living. (P, 123) "Provincia Deserta" was a breakthrough for Pound, and the paradigm it established of a speaker standing in a specified landscape, watching the spirits of the dead pass by him, became one of the structuring devices for the early Cantos. In Canto 4 Pound sits "there in the arena" near Verona (4/16), recording the visions of the past that rise and fade before him. In Three Cantos (1917) he would organize his visions of the past around Sirmione and Dordogne. His history is presented as a first-hand experience of the spirit of the place.

THE PERIGORD PHANTASTIKON

85

Pound's placement of "Provincia Deserta" in Lustra (1916), the much-delayed volume that collected the poems Pound had published since Ripostes (1912), sheds an additional light on its important place in Pound's development of a form for a poem including history. Pound gave a great deal of thought to the organization of his volumes, and Lustra was no exception. Frightened by the response to Lawrence's The Rainbow, Pound's publisher, Elkin Mathews, wanted to cut several of the more indecorous poems from Lustra. Pound recalled the mistake he had made with Canzoni and asked Mathews to "think of the book as a whole, not of individual words in it. Even certain smaller poems, unimportant in themselves have a function in the book-as-a-whole" (PJ, 285). Mathews finally published two versions of Lustra; the unexpurgated version was sold under the counter to those who requested it. The first half of "the book-as-a-whole" is made up of the Imagist poems and social satires that Pound had been publishing in periodicals throughout the First World War. The spectrum of shallow lives and unfulfilled moments that these poems present is best revealed by the epigram that Pound wrote for Lustra when he reprinted its contents in the 1926 edition oiPersonae: And the days are not full enough And the nights are not full enough And life slips by like a field mouse Not shaking the grass. (P, 80) Lustra chronicles a people who have not learned to find the virtu of their moments as they pass. In explanation of the volume's title, Pound offers a definition that elucidates his attitude toward these poems: "LUSTRUM: an offering for the sins of the whole people, made by the censors at the expiration of theirfiveyears of office, etc." (P, 78). "Provincia Deserta," coming at the midpoint of the volume, inaugurates a new movement in Lustra. While the satiric poems of the first half paint a people who have no sense of the permanence of the past, "Provincia Deserta" presents a movement into the past. It resurrects the Perigord phantastikon and offers its riches to the doldrums of war-

86

CHAPTER 4

time London. Furthermore, after "ProvinciaDeserta," Pound continues to turn his attention to the past: this poem about twelfth-century Provence introduces Pound's translations of eighth-century Chinese poems, originally published in Cathay (1915). This movement into the past is not dictated by chronology, as in Canzoni, but by a moment of contemplative insight. After the Chinese poems, Pound prints "Near Perigord," a more complicated investigation of the Perigord phantastikon that offers incisive questions about the nature of Pound's historicism. In "Near Perigord" Pound the skeptic and Pound the visionary have their first major confrontation. Previous commentary on "Near Perigord" has stressed Pound's condensation of techniques adopted from Browning's Sordello and The Ring and the Book. Browning was an important poet for Pound, and the historical sense he presents in The Ring and the Book may serve as another touchstone for Pound's sense of the past: . . . man, bounded, yearning to be free, May so project his surplusage of soul In search of body, so add self to self. . . That, although nothing which had never life Shall get life from him, be, not having been, Yet, something dead may get to live again, Something with too much life or not enough, Which, either way imperfect, ended once: An end whereat man's impulse intervenes, Makes new beginning, starts the dead alive, Completes the incomplete and saves the thing. Like Pound, Browning felt that it is "fiction which makes fact alive."5 But unlike Browning, Pound was not so concerned with the discovery of "historical truth," and readers of "Near Perigord," sensing the Browningian origins of Pound's art, have asked the poem the wrong questions. And because "Near Perigord" fails to discover any "historical truths," it has been read as an expression of the failure of historical inquiry, the impossibility of historical knowledge.6 On the contrary, Pound sets out in "Near Perigord" to redefine historical knowledge altogether. Coming near the end of a volume of poetry that

THE PERIGORD PHANTASTIKON

87

portrays a people without history, it reveals the ways in which the past can work for the present. Pound's understanding of the complexities of historical knowledge is more incisive than his commentators have generally given him credit for. In 1912 Pound read Max Simon Nordau's The Interpretation of History (translated into English in 1911): "I've been reading De Maupassant & Nordau," he wrote Dorothy Shakespear: "This latter is as stupid as the former is intelligent—or rather his conclusions are fairly sound, but his reasons for 'em are idiotic" (PSL, 171). Nordau's book opens with a fashionably Nietzschean critique of historical knowledge, which along with his garbled prose (Dorothy Shakespear found it "unreadable" [PSL, 57]) was probably the source of Pound's ire: History is not identical with written history, and is only to a very small extent included within it. The claim of written history to be a science is unfounded. . . . it can only satisfy formally, for the pictures that it throws upon the black background of the past are not aspects of reality, but projections of subjective ideas.7 Pound was as skeptical as Nordau about uncovering anything called "historical truth" or the past "as it was," but unlike Nordau (and like more powerful philosophers of history such as Dilthey and Collingwood), Pound was interested in revealing the ways in which history can provide us with knowledge even if it is a knowledge that cannot be called "objective" or "scientific." Near the end of The Interpretation of History Nordau leaves his garbled skepticism behind and writes that "behind all appearances and all delusions, we find the real meaning of history to be the manifestation of the life force in mankind."8 It takes Nordau over four hundred pages to reach his conclusion; in "Near Perigord" Pound travels the same distance—without slighting the complexity of the issues—in seven. "Near Perigord" begins with what the reader will eventually learn is a false question: the poem asks whether Bertran de Born's canzon "Dompna pois de me no'us cal" (a translation of which appears earlier in Lustra) was a love poem or a political strategy designed to set his neighbors warring among each other. Bertran's poem tells of his

CHAPTER 4

88

rejection by an unnamed lady and of his creation of a "borrowed lady," constructed from the best features of his neighbors' wives, to take her place: And since I could not find a peer to you, Neither one so fair, nor of such heart, So eager and alert, Nor with such art In attire, nor so gay Nor with gift so bountiful and so true, I will go out a-searching, Culling from each a fair trait To make me a borrowed lady Till I again find you ready. (P, 105) This is all that Bertran's poem reveals of his intentions. The rest of the story comes from the razo, the late Provengal commentary, written to accompany the poem long after Bertran's death. Pound did not translate the razo, but he found most of his material for "Near Perigord" in it. I offer here a modern translation: Bertran de Born was in love with a young gentlewoman of great merit whose name was Maent de Montagnac, and she was the wife of Talairan, brother of the Count of Perigord; she was also the daughter of the Viscount of Turenne and sister of my lady Maria de Ventadorn and Aelis de Montfort. And according to what he says in this song, she turned him away and took leave of him, which made him very sad and downcast. And he realized he would never win her back nor find another so beautiful, so good, so charming and so cultured. And since he could find none equal to his lady, he thought to fashion one by borrowing traits from other lovely and worthy ladies, taking from each one a particular quality of beauty, expression, charm, speech, conduct, stature or figure. And thus he went about asking each of the good ladies to give him one of the gifts you have heard me mention, in order that he might refashion the lady he had lost.9 Pound refers to this razo (which he assumes to be the work of the late Prove^al writer Uc de Saint-Circ) in his note on the "historical

THE PERIGORD PHANTASTIKON

89

data" of "Near Perigord," which appeared with the poem when it was first published in Poetry magazine: The historical data for this poem, are, first, Uc de St. Circ's statement that Bertrans de Born was in love with the Lady Maent, wife of Sir Tairiran of Montaignac, and that when she turned him out he wrote a canzon, Domna pots de me no'us cal. . . . Second, as to the possibility of a political intrigue behind the apparent love poem we have no evidence save that offered by my own observations of the geography of Perigord and Limoges. I must leave the philologists and professional tacticians to decide whether Bertrans's proclivities for stirring up the barons were due to his liver or to "military necessity."10 Pound's hostility toward these straw-man philologists betrays his own strategy in "Near Perigord." Pound would have known that the "historical data" he gleaned from the razo are dubious. The lady Maent is never mentioned in Bertran's canzon; she is the fiction of the razo writer. Furthermore, to ask of Bertran's canzon, "Is it a love poem? Did he sing of war?" as Pound does in the first section of "Near Perigord" (P, 153) is as pointless as asking if Bertran's aggressions were due to libidinal or political causes. From Nordau, Pound would have learned that the investigation of historical causes is a fruitless endeavor: To-day advanced and strictly rationalistic thinkers compel themselves to resist their natural tendency to conform to the logical habit of seeking for final causes. They have arrived at the conclusion that, since this final cause lies outside human experience, and beyond its comprehension, reflection upon it must be fruitless. It is, moreover, only a survival of an old delusion to speak of the final cause only as eluding our intelligence; the adjective may go: the first and nearest cause of phenomena is as unattainable, as incomprehensible, as the final.11 In the second section of "Near Perigord" Pound makes the same point by recreating a conversation between Arnaut Daniel and Richard the Lionhearted. These two men, who knew Bertran personally,

CHAPTER 4

90

are no better at determining the "cause" that lies behind his canzon than a modern historian: Plantagenet puts the riddle: "Did he love her?" And Arnaut parries: "Did he love your sister? True, he has praised her, but in some opinion He wrote that praise only to show he had The favour of your party; had been well received." "You knew the man." "You knew the man." "I am an artist, you have tried both metiers." "You were born near him." "Do we know our friends?" "Say that he saw the castles, say that he loved Maent!" "Say that he loved her, does it solve the riddle?" (P, 155-156) In this imaginary conversation, Arnaut and Richard each present the other's qualifications for correctly interpreting Bertran's canzon: Richard is both troubadour and statesman, and therefore better equipped to say whether the poem is motivated by love or politics; Arnaut was born near Bertran and knows him better. But neither of them can be certain, and their conversation ends with the riddle that Pound had posed ("Is it a love poem? Did he sing of war?") unsolved. "The relation of two individuals," Pound would write in 1919, "is so complex that no third person can pass judgment upon it" (LE, 355). "Near Perigord" does not present the failure of historical inquiry, however. The conversation between Arnaut and Richard is designed not to emphasize the failure of historical inquiry but to show that the question Pound asks at the beginning of the poem is not one that history can answer. As the third section of "Near Perigord" reveals, Pound believes that history has other kinds of significance that are readily available. After the imaginary conversation, the second section of the poem ends with these lines: And we can leave the talk till Dante writes: Surely I saw, and still before my eyes

THE PERIGORD PHANTASTIKON

91

Goes on that headless trunk, that bears for light Its own head swinging, gripped by the dead hair, And like a swinging lamp that says, "Ah me! I severed men, my head and heart Ye see here severed, my life's counterpart." (P, 156) These lines are Pound's paraphase of Dante's vision of Bertran in Canto 28 of the Inferno. In an important discussion of "Near Perigord" Hugh Kenner has explained the function of these lines: "This, not anything recoverable from documents or from the testimony of any acquaintance however intimate, is the image of Bertran de Born that has persisted for six hundred years. . . . The one reality that no discussion shakes is evinced by art." The image from Dante is Pound's one certainty, but I think Kenner is wrong to say that it "does not directly assist our present [historical] enquiries."12 The clue leading to a proper reading of these lines lies in the epigram for the third section of "Near Perigord," a quotation from Dante's description of Bertran in the Inferno: "Ed eran due in uno, ed uno in due" [and they were two in one and one in two]. Dante is describing Bertran and his severed head, but Pound rips the line from its context and uses it to describe his own technique: the third part of the poem is a dramatic monologue in which Pound leaves both his skepticism and his concern for the "cause" of Bertran's canzon behind and projects himself directly into Bertran's consciousness. This dramatic monologue is the perfect vehicle for Pound's historicism: Pound and Bertran are "two in one and one in two" as Pound disregards the quibbles about the truth of the facts and employs what information he has for an imaginative reconstruction of the past. The poem ends with the fictional Bertran's image of the fictional Maent: There shut up in his castle, Tairiran's, She who had nor ears nor tongue save in her hands, Gone—ah, gone—untouched, unreachable! She who could never live save through one person, She who could never speak save to one person, And all the rest of her a shifting change, A broken bundle of mirrors. . . ! (P, 157)

CHAPTER 4

92

Reading these lines, Kenner concludes that Bertran's canzon is "literally accurate homage: Maent herself, like the lady in the canzone, was a collection of fragments. Perhaps it was a love-poem. Perhaps it sang of war. . . . But preeminently, it was imitation in the Aristotelian sense: an arrangement of words and images corresponding to the mode of being possessed by the subject."15 For Kenner, the poem provides artistic but not historical knowledge. In making this judgment, Kenner relies on Aristotle's dictum that the poet does not describe "the thing that has been" but the "thing that might be. Hence Poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universale, whereas those of history are singulars."14 This is precisely the issue that Pound addresses, but instead of emphasizing the distinction between art and history, he obliterates it. While Nordau wrote in The Interpretation ofHistory that history "may afford aesthetic satisfaction, but not real knowledge,"15 Pound asserts in "Near Perigord" that real knowledge is aesthetic satisfaction; like the early Croce he shows how history is subsumed under the concept of art. Fully aware that he cannot know the intimate details of Maent or Bertran (one a fictional character, the other historical—a distinction that the poem blurs), Pound reveals that the only way we know anything about the past is through imaginative reconstruction. In "Near Perigord" the value of history does not lie in the philological accuracy of interpretation but in the very act of historical interpretation itself. We need to understand the past in order to live complete lives in the present. His placement of "Near Perigord" in the larger structure oiLustra makes this point even stronger. When "Near Perigord" was first published in Poetry magazine, it appeared beside a companion poem, "Villanelle: The Psychological Hour." In Lustra Pound kept these two poems side by side. Like the shorter poems in the first half of the volume, "Villanelle: The Psychological Hour" presents a static, unfulfilled moment in the present. Pound waits for visitors who do not call and laments the passing of time: Two friends: a breath of the forest. . . Friends? Are people less friends

THE PERIGORD PHANTASTIKON

93

because one has just, at last, found them? Twice they promised to come. "Between the night and morning?" Beauty would drink of my mind, Youth would awhile forget my youth is gone from me. (P, 158) The most enigmatic line in this poem, "Between the night and morning?" is an allusion to Yeats's "The People," first published in the February 1916 issue of Poetry. Like so many of Pound's allusions, the reference to Yeats adds an entirely new layer of meaning to the poem. Here is the line as it appears in Yeats's poem: "What have I earned for all that work," I said, "For all that I have done at my own charge? The daily spite of this unmannerly town, Where who has served the most is most defamed, The reputation of his lifetime lost Between the night and morning. I might have lived, And you know well how great the longing has been, Where every day my footfall should have lit In the green shadow of Ferrara wall; Or climbed among the images of the past— The unperturbed and courtly images— Evening and morning, the steep street of Urbino To where the Duchess and her people talked The stately midnight through until they stood In their great window looking at the dawn.16 In "Villanelle: The Psychological Hour" Pound worries that his friends have deserted him "between the night and morning." But Yeats's "The People" reveals that instead of remaining preoccupied with his audience, he should climb "among the images of the past." This is what Pound does in "Near Perigord," and "Villanelle: The Psychological Hour" reveals the horribly static existence that results from the lack of the historical sense. These two poems are not, as some of Pound's readers have thought, examinations of the impossi-

94

CHAPTER 4

bility of capturing time, past and present.17 "Near Perigord" reveals the techniques through which the past can be known in the present, and "Villanelle: The Psychological Hour" shows the lifeless present that results from ignoring the advice offered in "Near Perigord." "Near Perigord" and "The People" highlight an important aspect of Pound's historicism: for both Yeats and Pound, the reclamation of the past necessitated a rejection of what they considered the common "middle-class" values of the present. "The daily spite of this unmannerly town," writes Yeats, has kept him from greater tasks. History is not something communal, available to all people. In "Near Perigord" Pound resurrects Bertran de Born only by projecting his individual personality into the past. He could share this effort with Yeats, but he could not share it with the people. For an existential historian, history is always the function of the interaction between a single person's consciousness and a single moment in the past. This passionate intensity results in both the methodological strength and the ideological flaw of existential historicism: on the one hand the historian brings an invigorating passion to his work; on the other he perceives himself as a privileged interpreter.18 When confronted with his knowledge of the relativity of all interpretation, he emphasizes the enlightened superiority of his own work as the justification for imposing his own view of the past over others. Even Max Simon Nordau, writing The Interpretation of History in the early years of the twentieth century, recognized this danger: The historical sense is an artificial product of the ruling classes, who use it as a means for investing the existing order, which is advantageous to themselves alone, with a mystic and poetic charm, for beautifying abuses by the glorification of their origin, and for casting a glamour of half-tender, half-reverential awe over institutions that have long lost any reasonable justification and become useless and meaningless. Its practical purpose, in a word, is to oppress and deceive the present with the assistance of the past.19 We do not know what Pound thought when he read these sentences, but I suspect that he would have considered this criticism a virtue—except for the fact that he would have thought of the artist-

THE PERIGORD PHANTASTIKON

95

historians themselves as the ruling class, not as the servants of any political order. Pound did consider himself an inspired interpreter, and especially after he saw the First World War wipe away centuries of European history, he felt that the conservation of the past depended upon the efforts of an enlightened few. "Near Perigord" was written during the First World War; the question around which the poem circles (whether or not a lyric may be inspired by war) was timely and provocative. The same question might be asked of Pound's next attempt at a poem including history, the 1917 version of the first Three Cantos. This tentative version of the opening of Pound's fifty-year epic makes no direct reference to the war, but its more expansive view of history (especially the history lurking in the landscapes of France and Italy, countries Pound could not visit during the war) is necessarily bound up with Pound's concern with the postwar fate of western culture. Three Cantos would be abandoned when Pound assembled^ Draft ofXVI Cantos in 1925; the translation from Divus's Homer with which Three Cantos concludes would become Canto 1 and only a few scattered lines would be saved for the final version of Canto 3. 20 But in Three Cantos we can already see the seeds of Pound's desire to write a poem that would not only include history but change history. And in the subsequent revisions of Three Cantos, we can see the beginnings of both the strengths and weaknesses that would mark his lifelong effort.

Chapter Five

Three Cantos and the War Against Philology

When Pound constructed his vision of a postwar hell in Cantos 14 and 15, he made a special place for philologists among the politicians and profiteers: The slough of unamiable liars, bog of stupidities, malevolent stupidities, and stupidities, the soil of living pus, full of vermin, dead maggots begetting live maggots, slum owners, usurers squeezing crab-lice, pandars to authority, pets-de-loup, sitting on piles of stone books, obscuring the texts with philology. (14/63) Pound had been rebelling against his graduate training in philology for over a decade when Λ Draft of XVI Cantos was published in 1925. But his experience of the First World War added a new burden to his dissatisfaction with philological scholarship. Pound began to see it as one symptom of a larger disease—or worse, the root of the disease it­ self. The 1922 "Paris Letter" Pound sent to lht Dial began by stating that "all men should 'Unite to give praise to Ulysses' " and ended with this postwar lamentation: A sense of style could have saved America and Europe from Wilson; it would have been useful to our diplomats. The motjuste is of pub­ lic utility. I can't help it. I am not offering this fact as a sop to aes­ thetes who want all authors to be fundamentally useless. We are governed by words, the laws are graven words, and literature is the sole means of keeping these words living and accurate. (PJ, 200) Philologists did the opposite: they kept words accurate but dead, and had no sense of style because they had no personality. In Pound's

THREE CANTOS

97

eyes, the philological training he received as a graduate student and the military training soldiers received in Germany proceeded from the same evil: the ideal of national, intellectual, and cultural unity expressed by the German word Kultur. Against this program of subservience to centralized authority, Pound upheld the rights of individuals. Whether one works in a university "confining his attention to ablauts" or in an army marching over Belgian towns, theorized Pound, "it is all one with the idea that the man is the slave of the State, the 'unit,' the piece of the machine." The individual has sacrificed his vitality to an "idea dictated by someone else" (SP, 191-192). At the same time, Pound knew that he had gleaned a great deal of otherwise unobtainable knowledge from his training in philology. He dramatized his ambivalent feelings for this German science in one of the earliest drafts for Canto 4. In these lines written in 1915 Pound masquerades as a young Englishman who studied at a German university before the war. (Oh, /) sopped up kultur, I liked it, I liked germans. Got (moved up a peg) Moved on tojena, went through the doctorate, Oh well that's all over. When the show began,? In Hungary, a visit a puplis' people, Couldn't think we'd come in. Family', boys' mother and some other children. Excited by war, the "russian revolution", I ran the estate . . . After the war began this young Englishman lived with a German family, pretending to be a German, until he was asked to leave so that the children would not "get a wrong impression I of englishmen." The young man witnessed the efforts of the Prussian state to impose a German nationality on the people of Poland: Posen [Poland] resists kultur, millions like water poured out to make them German,

CHAPTER 5

98

Poles have their cafes, germans still have theirs, The place a fortress, people will talk polish, Children beaten in school, but will talk polish, The place a fortress. Between his repeated assertions that he "liked the german people," the Englishman reveals the evils of what Pound would have called "provincialism"—"A desire to coerce others into uniformity" (SP, 189). After the Englishman is locked in a prison in Salzburg, he returns to England via Switzerland and then enlists in the British army. He reveals that he has been fighting against Germans at the front for six months. "Loyalty," he concludes, "is hard to explain."] Pound's point is that loyalty should be directed toward the sovereignty of the individual human being, not the sovereignty of the state. As Christine Froula has suggested, the soldier's monologue "expresses the absurdity of a world arbitrarily divided into antagonistic nations" and consequently ends with an image that stresses the fundamental unity of apparently divergent cultures: Sen-sei Pere Henri Jacques {ex-Jesuitfather) Talks with the sennin near the summit of Rok-ko.2 Although the young Englishman who speaks this monologue is far more naive than Pound, he nevertheless serves as a mouthpiece for Pound's own confusion. Like his speaker, Pound had "sopped up kultur" at the University of Pennsylvania; he knew that the American system of research-oriented higher education was modeled on the German universities (the Johns Hopkins University first set the trend in 1876), and he knew that great studies of the troubadours had come out of Freiburg. Philologists trained at German universities were responsible for saving parts of western culture, yet soldiers who were a product of the same educational system could just as easily destroy it. Both worked, in Pound's eyes, for the good of the Prussian state. Given Pound's later sympathies with totalitarian governments, his political thought during the First World War was remarkably democratic. And he was not the only person who sensed that the war revealed the potential evil of the German educational system. John

THREE CANTOS

99

Dewey, the American pragmatist philosopher who specialized in educational reform, published an essay on "Education and Social Direction" in the Dial in 1918: It is not surprising that many persons in the United States who are accustomed to think of themselves as belonging to the "upper" and therefore rightfully ruling class, and who are impressed by the endurance and resistance of Germany in the war, should look with envious admiration upon the Prussian system of authoritarian education. To suppose however that they desire a direct importation of the German system of autocratic power and willing submissiveness in order to secure the discipline and massive order of Germany, is to make a blunder. They see America retaining its familiar traditions; for the most part they would be sincerely shocked at a suggestion of surrender of democratic habits. What they see in their fancy is an America essentially devoted to democratic ideals and rising to the service of these ideals with a thoroughness, a unanimity, an efficiency and ordered discipline which they imagine would be secured by a judicious adoption of German methods. Like Pound, Dewey promulgated an educational system that would "develop that kind of individuality which is intelligently alive to the common life and sensitively loyal to its common maintenance."3 Both men disparaged an educational program that sacrificed individuality to nationality, personality to obedience, living style to mere accuracy. Pound never met Dewey but he did find an ally in Ford Madox Hueffer (Ford). Before he changed his German surname Ford took advantage of his heritage to write When Blood Is Their Argument (1915), an examination of German culture and character. After tracing the political history of Germany during the nineteenth century, Ford then examines the "Defects of the German University System." During the first half of the nineteenth century, he explains, the German universities promoted the unification of academic life and artistic production. This period was succeeded by "the period of exactness—a period of stagnation in academic life, of the gradual'deterioration of all learning into philology, and of the gradual disappearance of artistic effort." Today, says Ford, "a German university is nothing more

100

CHAPTER 5

nor less than an institution for providing State officials of an orthodox turn of mind."4 Ford was not exaggerating the situation. In 1890 the emperor delivered an address urging German gymnasium instructors not to teach anything (the Latin language, for instance) that did not promote German nationalism. In light of the war that had already begun, Ford paraphrased the emperor's address this way: "You, the teachers of Germany, have only two functions—that of delivering into my hands physically well-trained and morally well-disciplined young men who may become my soldiers, and that of instructing them that social democratic ideas shall be entirely stamped out of the minds of the German manhood of the future."5 Ford also pointed out that governmental sanctions restricted the scope of university research; consequently, research became emptied of any subject matter that might be considered controversial: It followed, then, that if the student was forbidden to pursue researches into the spirit of Plato or of the Greek anthology he must pursue his researches either into the facts of the lives of the poets or philosophers, or into their philologies. Thus we have such a phenomenon as a three-volume dissertation upon the punctuation and the orthography of Hafiz which tells you nothing whatever of the thoughts which filled the mind of the poet, of the images with which he embodied them.6 For Ford, this emphasis on philology forecasted "the death of the arts, of the historic sense, and of creative or adaptable philosophy." In his eyes, it formed the heart of the German sense ofKultur. While a historian of eighteenth-century English poetry would concern himself with the artistic methods of major figures (what Pound called "donative artists" in I Gather the Limbs of Osiris), the historian oiKultur would concern himself with the great range of what Pound called "symptomatic artists": He would treat all these men with an absolute impartiality, paying no attention to the one more than the other; he would devote great length to the topics of their respective syntaxes and philologies;

THREE CANTOS

101

would devote a treatise to the uses of the words "will" and "shall" respectively in Scotch and English, and would carefully tabulate how many times each of these poets used the word "until" instead of the word "till."7 When Pound read Ford's When Bkod Is Their Argument he saw more clearly the roots of his own education, and he saw how those roots could produce neither a vital art nor a vital society. He told his mother that "the book is very good. I trust the faculty of my rotten University will read and digest it."8 With Ford's encouragement, Pound now realized that his condemnation of philological method in I Gather the Limbs of Osiris had not been strong enough, and he rewrote that condemnation in a series of essays titled Provincialism the Enemy in order to show that philology could not only stifle the arts but promote a war.9 The four segments of Provincialism the Enemy appeared in the New Age during the summer of 1917 at the same time that Three Cantos appeared in Poetry, As Provincialism the Enemy presented an intensified version of the "new method in scholarship," Three Cantos revealed Pound's latest attempt to write a long poem including history during wartime. Ford wrote in When Blood Is Their Argument that because Germany is divided into distinct cultural centers, German culture is marked by "the disadvantages of what Germans call 'Kleinstadtigkeit,' which we might render by the English word 'provincialism.' "10 Pound begins Provincialism the Enemy by defining this word. PROVINCIALISM consists in:

(a) An ignorance of the manners, customs and nature of people living outside one's own village, parish, or nation. (b) A desire to coerce others into uniformity. (SP, 189) England and France are civilizations, Pound maintains, because they "have not g'ven way to the yelp of 'nationality.' " Recognizing that this is a "debatable statement," he emphasizes that the difference between France and Germany is that France has kept "some real respect for personality, for the outline of the individual" and has not "been coercible into a Kultur; into a damnable holy Roman Empire, holy

102

CHAPTER 5

Roman Church orthodoxy, obedience, Deutschland iiber Alles, infallibility, mouse-trap" (SP, 190). As he demonstrated with the monologue of the British soldier in the drafts for the early cantos, Pound believed that civilization is in no way synonymous with nationality and is in fact dependent upon the interpenetration of disparate cultures. The mettle of Pound's argument in Provincialism the Enemy is partially due to the wave of anti-German sentiment that swept over England during the war. But the bulk of Pound's argument rests on his own involvement with the philological method that Ford maintained was a perversion of German historicism: People see no connection between "philology" and the Junker. Now, apart from intensive national propaganda, quite apart from the German national propaganda, the "university system" of Germany is evil. . . . It is in essence a provincialism. It is the "single" bait which caught all the German intellectuals, and which had hooked many of their American confreres (even before "exchange professorships" had set in). Its action in Germany was perfectly simple. Every man of intelligence had that intelligence nicely switched on to some particular problem, some minute particular problem unconnected with life, unconnected with main principles (to use a detestable, much abused phrase). By confining his attention to ablauts, hair-length, foraminifera, he could become at a small price an "authority," a celebrity. I myself am an "authority," I was limed to that extent. It takes some time to get clean. (SP, 191) Like Ford, Pound now sees that the organization of the German state and the German university proceed from the same provincial ideal: both uphold the value of national unity over individual creativity. The American and German systems of higher education discouraged the ideal of knowledge as "the adornment of the mind" and made the student "the bondslave of his subject." The philologist is forced, as Ford pointed out, to bury himself in detailed questions of morphology that have nothing to do with the life of poetry. "Take a

THREE CANTOS

103

man's mind off the human value of the poem he is reading," adds Pound, "switch it on to some question of grammar and you begin his dehumanisation." The philologist becomes "accustomed to receiving his main ideas without question: then to being indifferent to them. In this state he has accepted the Deutschland iiber Alles idea, in this state he has accepted the idea that he is an ant, not a human being" (SP, 197,192). In I Gather the Limbs of Osiris Pound had countered the dehumanized philological tradition with a new method of scholarship based on a visionary and personal poetics drawn from Pater and mediaeval mysticism. Virtu, the essence of individuality, is what Pound seeks in a poem. In Provincialism the Enemy he finds both more ancient and more modern precedents for this humanism in Confucius and Remy de Gourmont.11 But his emphasis on individuality—whether in scholarship or politics—finally rests on the Renaissance spirit he had learned from Pater: The history of the world is the history of temperaments in opposition. A sane historian will recognise this, a sane sociologist will recognise the value of "temperament." I am not afraid to use a word made ridiculous by its associations with freaks and Bohemians. France and England are civilization, and they are civilization because they, more than other nations, do recognise such diversity. Modern civilization comes out of Italy, out of renaissance Italy, the first nation which broke away from Aquinian dogmatism, and proclaimed the individual; respected the personality. That enlightenment still gleams in the common Italian's "Cosi son io!" when asked for the cause of his acts. (SP, 199) Pound continued his attack on modern philology and his fight for the ideals of Renaissance humanism in "An Anachronism at Chinon," an imaginary conversation published in the Little Review during the summer of 1917. Throughout this dialogue between an American student and the ghost of Rabelais, the student serves as a mouthpiece for Pound's condemnation of his graduate education: Student: I speak in no passion when I say that the whole aim, or at least the drive, of modern philology is to make a man stupid; to

CHAPTER 5

104

turn his mind from the fire of genius and smother him with things unessential. Germany has so stultified her savants that they have had no present perception, the men who should have perceived were all imbedded in "scholarship." (PD, 90) The ghost of Rabelais, who literally represents the awakening spirit of the Renaissance in this dialogue, responds that in his day the monasteries restricted the pursuit of learning in much the same way as the modern universities do. The student agrees that the "role of your monastery is now assumed by the 'institutions of learning,' " but nevertheless maintains that Rabelais speaks "of a time when scholarship was new, when humanism had not given way to philology" (PD, 89). Pound's objective was to restore the spirit of humanism to both his scholarship and his plan for a poem including history. He needed to discover a way to include history in his poem that would not rely on the dull methods of philology. He had taken a step in that direction with "Near Perigord," but the method he used in the shorter poem could not sustain the poem of eighty or one hundred cantos he was now planning. The danger inherent in such a poem was that it would appear to be built on the unimpassioned method of "multitudinous detail" that Pound had rejected in I Gather the Limbs of Osiris. In order to save himself (and western culture—for he had already begun to think in these larger terms) from the provincialism that escalated the First World War, Pound needed to write a poem that would include the history not only of Perigord but of the whole of western culture. In Provincialism the Enemy Pound praised Henry James for "his unending endeavour to provide a common language, an idiom of manners and meanings for the three nations, England, America, France" (SP, 189). In Three Cantos Pound's ambitions were even larger. And his problem of finding a form for these early cantos was compounded by his insistence upon the ideal of individuality. His poem needed to be simultaneously the epic of the west and an embodiment of the ideal of personal involvement in history that Pound had emphasized ever since he published "Histrion" in 1908: Thus I am Dante for a space and am One Francois Villon, ballad-lord and thief

THREE CANTOS

105

Or am such holy ones I may not write, Lest blasphemy be writ against my name; This for an instant and the flame is gone. (CEP, 71) The form of Pound's dialogue with Rabelais reveals in miniature the method Pound would adopt to include history in Three Cantos. Throughout this imaginary conversation the student converses with the ghost of Rabelais—the spirit of a man who has been dead for centuries, brought back to life to speak his wisdom. So would Three Cantos end, with Odysseus pouring out the blood to give new life to spirits. Throughout Three Cantos the various and overlapping moments from the past appear as visions, ghostly presences that are presented by an individual consciousness. Pound wants to emphasize that the learning built into the poem is fired by an individual passion for the past, not the philologist's lifeless categorization of facts. Three Cantos is a profoundly visionary poem, and its visionary method of historical reconstruction is a variation of Pound's Imagist poetics. The step from the Imagist poem to the poem including history is a large one, however, and in order to understand that step we must first see that Imagism was not a purely technical program for poetry. Although Pound stressed the importance of the Imagist "Don'ts," he also maintained a private "doctrine of the Image" that employed those technical dicta in the service of a poetics of visionary experience.12 He revealed this doctrine of the Image most explicitly in "Ikon," a prose-poem published in the Cerebralist in 1913. Following a long essay (probably by Richard Aldington) that emphasizes what Hugh Kenner has called the "hygienic" aspect of Imagist poetics, "Ikon" reveals how for Pound the Imagist's purified language was usually designed to render a visionary experience: It is in art the highest business to create the beautiful image; to create order and profusion of images that we may furnish the life of our minds with a noble surrounding. And if—as some say, the soul survives the body; if our consciousness is not an intermittent melody of strings that relapse between whiles into silence, then more than ever should we put forth the images of beauty, that going out into tenantless spaces we have with us all that is needful—an abundance of sounds and patterns to en-

106

CHAPTER 5

tertain us in that long dreaming; to strew our path to Valhalla; to give rich gifts by the way. (PSL, 277-278) This openly mystical conception of the Image allows us to see more clearly that even the most well-known Imagist poems ("In a Station of the Metro" or "The Return") are "equations" for realities perceived with visionary powers. Pound once again made this visionary aspect of his private conception of Imagism clear when he renamed Imagism as "Phanopoeia" in "How to Read" (1929). Phanopoeia is "a casting of images upon the visual imagination" (LE, 25). And in a poem titled "Phanopoeia" (first published in 1918) Pound reveals that these Images do indeed originate in the "visual imagination" rather than the natural world: The swirl of light follows me through the square, The smoke of incense Mounts from the four horns of my bed-posts, The water-jet of gold light bears us up through the ceilings; Lapped in the gold-coloured flame I descend through the aether. The silver ball forms in my hand, It falls and rolls to your feet. (P, 169) Like "Ikon," "Phanopoeia" offers a more candid glimpse of the secret doctrine of the Image that lurks behind the hygienic dicta of "A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste." Pound wrote that in "Phanopoeia we find the greatest drive toward utter precision of word; this art exists almost exclusively by it" (LE, 26). Pound learned early in his career from Dante and Cavalcanti that if he were to render imperceptible realities in his poetry, he had to present them in the most concrete and precise language possible. "Dante's 'Paradiso,' " said Pound in one of his most cryptic and extravagant moments, "is the most wonderful image" (GB, 86). Throughout Three Cantos Pound would continue to employ his Imagist technique to render visions of the heavens; he would also use the technique to render visions of the past—what Croce, in his own war against philology, would have called "intuitions of the actual" rather

THREE CANTOS

107

than "intuitions of the possible." Pound presented a trial run of this visionary method of recording history in "Fish and the Shadow," first published in Poetry in 1916. He knew that this poem occupied an important place in his development, and made it the final poem in Lustra, a volume designed to demonstrate the value of the historical sense. "Fish and the Shadow" is a masterpiece of Pound's clipped Imagist style, and like "The Return" or "In a Station of the Metro," the language is designed to embody a transcendental vision. Here, however, the vision is not of some transcendental world but of a moment in the past: The salmon-trout drifts in the stream, The soul of the salmon-trout floats over the stream Like a little wafer of light. The salmon moves in the sun-shot, bright shallow sea. . . . As light as the shadow of the fish that falls through the water, She came into the large room by the stair, Yawning a little she came with the sleep still upon her. "I am just from bed. The sleep is still in my eyes. "Come. I have had a long dream." And I: "That wood? "And two springs have passed us." "Not so far, no, not so far now, There is a place—but no one else knows it— A field in a valley . . . Qu 'ieu sui avinen, leu losai." She must speak of the time Of Arnaut de Mareuil, I thought, "qu'ieu sui avinen." Light as the shadow of the fish That falls through the pale green water. (P, 166) The woman in the poem has had a dream that transports her into a foreign place and time. The speaker of the poem believes that she has

CHAPTER 5

108

seen the troubadour Arnaut de Mareuil; the phrase of Provengal she recalls from her dream, "qu'ieu sui avinen, leu Io sai" [that I am handsome I know], recalls the razo that states that Arnaut was "avinenz hom de la persona."13 Pound compares the woman's dream-vision of twelfth-century Provence with a shadow cast by a fish. It floats on the moving water, but its source is the eternal light of the sun—the "river of art" from The Spirit ofRomance, thevirtu from IGather the Limbs ofOsiris. In Canto 4 (1919) Pound would use the same image of water and light to explain the presence of the gods throughout the many layers of historical events: Thus the light rains, thus pours, e Io sokilhplovil The liquid and rushing crystal beneath the knees of the gods. Ply over ply, thin glitter of water; Brook film bearing white petals. (4/15) In the original Three Cantos, which preceded Canto 4, dream-visions like the one recorded in "Fish and the Shadow" recede and emerge at will, ply over ply, creating a multiple layering of historical moments within the consciousness of the poem's speaker. In one of the earliest drafts of Three Cantos Pound wrote, "Now I will fall asleep, will hear in swevyn I Move in the past."14 He often admitted that he himself had the inexplicable experience of feeling transported into the past. Recalling his sittings for Gaudier-Brzeska's sculpting of his hieratic head, Pound wrote, there I was on a shilling wooden chair in a not overheated studio with the railroad trains rushing overhead, and there was the halfton block of marble on its stand, and bobbing about it was this head "out of the renaissance." I have now and again had the lark of escaping the present, and this was one of those expeditions. (GB, 48) This is the kind of experience Pound records in "Fish and the Shadow" and throughout Three Cantos. Although Pound deleted almost all references to the modern world

THREE CANTOS

109

from his drafts for Three Cantos, the poem remains a passionate reply to the forces that Pound believed were the cause of both the excesses of modern philology and the losses of the First World War. Provincialism the Enemy begins with Flaubert's famous remark that if his countrymen had read his apparently apolitical Education Sentimentale, the Franco-Prussian war might have been avoided. "As Armageddon has only too clearly shown," Pound wrote in his 1918 essay on Henry James, national qualities are the great gods of the present and Henry James spent himself from the beginning in an analysis of these potent chemicals; trying to determine from the given microscopic slide the nature of the Frenchness, Englishness, Germanness, Americanness, which chemicals too little regarded, have in our time exploded for want of watching. . . . The portrayal of these forces, to seize a term from philology, may be said to constitute "original research"—to be Henry James' own addendum; not that this greatly matters. He saw, analysed, and presented them. He had most assuredly a greater awareness than was granted to Balzac or to Mr Charles Dickens or to M. Victor Hugo who composed the Legende des Sticks. (LE, 300-301) James's work was not what Pound's teachers taught him to think of as "philology"; it constituted a more potent kind of analysis, both a "history of a personal sort" and a "social history" (LE, 302). And after the Armageddon of the Great War, Pound felt that he had to continue James's research into the nature of national qualities. He had .already tried to write a long poem based on Hugo's Legende des sticks. In Three Cantos Pound's visionary rendering of the past is not only a riposte to his philological training but an attempt to forge a common language that would unite the antagonistic factions of Europe. We have seen that in "Near Perigord" Pound the visionary triumphed over Pound the skeptic. In Three Cantos the battle is taken up once again. This version of the poem including history begins by addressing Pound's belatedness: "Hang it all, there can be but oneSordello\" Lurking within this apostrophe to Browning is the problem of histor-

CHAPTER 5

110

ical relativism. How, Pound asks, can the historical Sordello be distinguished from the Sordello of Browning's poem? How can his own Sordello be distinguished from either of these? Disregarding the answers to these questions he had formulated in "Near Perigord," Pound ruminates again on the proper way of resurrecting the past. His critique of Browning continues with a catalogue of the errors and anachronisms of his Sordello: Trunk hose? There are not. The rough men swarm out In robes that are half Roman, half like the Knave of Hearts; And I discern your story: Piere Cardinal Was half forerunner of Dante. Arnaut's that trick Of the unfinished address, And half your dates are out, you mix your eras; For that great font Sordello sat beside— 'Tis an immortal passage, but the font?— Is some two centuries outside the picture. Does it matter? (Three Cantos 1,114)15 This question, "Does it matter?" is perhaps the most important one Pound asked in his ten-year search for a way to structure a long poem. His answer to the question not only forces him to present his best description of his historicism, but also marks the point at which that historicism finally becomes the structuring principle for his long poem. "Does it matter?" Pound asks, and the answer is "Not in the least." These anachronisms are of no consequence because of Pound's visionary sense of the past: Not in the least. Ghosts move about me Patched with histories. You had your business: To set out so much thought, so much emotion; To paint, more real than any dead Sordello, The half or third of your intensest life And call that third Sordello; And you'll say, "No, not your life,

THREE CANTOS

111

He never showed himself." Is't worth the evasion, what were the use Of setting figures up and breathing life upon them, Were't not our life, your life, my life, extended? (Three Cantos 1,114-115) As in "Near Perigord" Pound confirms that the function of the historian is not "archeological," not the digging up of the past "as it was" in order to be examined and classified, but the artistic, visionary process of imbuing the past with the life of the present. The ghosts that move about him, patched with histories, are "not dark and shadowy ghosts, / But the ancient living, wood-white, I Smooth as the inner bark, and firm of aspect" (Three Cantos 1,116). This contrast between the philological and the visionary sense of the past is emphasized by Pound's use of the story of Ignez da Castro in Three Cantos II. Pound first told the story, commenting on Canteens' use of it in Os Lusiadas, in The Spirit of Romance: In brief: Constange, wife of Pedro, heir to the throne of Portugal, died in 1345. He then married in secret one of her maids of honor, Ignez da Castro, a Castilian of the highest rank. Her position was the cause of jealousy, and of conspiracy; she was stabbed in the act of begging clemency from the then reigning Alfonso IV. When Pedro succeeded to the throne, he had her body exhumed, and the court did homage, the grandees of Portugal passing before the double throne of the dead queen and her king, and kissing that hand which had been hers. (SR, 218) In Three Cantos II Pound tells the story even more briefly, and the contrast to the "setting figures up and breathing life upon them" that he extols in Three Cantos I could not be more pointed: after Pedro became king, he had his will upon the dagger players, And held his court, a wedding ceremonial— He and her dug-up corpse in cerements Crowned with the crown and splendor of Portugal. (Three Cantos II, 186)

112

CHAPTER 5

Such is the fate of the philologist, says Pound: to kiss the hand of the rotted corpse of the past. The contrast to his own method of visionary interpretation is made even clearer when after these lines Pound proposes to "Dig up Camoens, hear out his resonant bombast." Camoens, the poet who immortalized Ignez, is allowed to speak through Pound himself, and he compares Ignez with Persephone, who returned from the dead not as a rotting corpse but as the goddess of rebirth.16 The passage in Three Cantos I in which Pound first introduces the ghostly presences that he will revive all through Three Cantos underwent several changes before Pound finally discarded it. When he rewrote the passage (with the help of T. S. Eliot) for the American edition oi Lustra it looked like this: And no matter. Ghosts move about me patched with histories. You had your business: to set out so much thought, So much emotion, and call the lot "Sordello." Worth the evasion, the setting figures up And breathing life upon them.17 Gone are the Browningesque turns of syntax, the questions, the hesitations. The line "Ghosts move about me patched with histories" has become its own forceful pentameter. Long after he deleted this passage from The Cantos, he remembered this line and used it again in Canto 84. And in 1918, when he published excerpts from Three Cantos in The Future, he began what he called his "Passages from the Opening Address in a Long Poem" with this passage as he had revised it for the American Lustra. As Ronald Bush has shown, the selection of these excerpts was dictated not only by considerations of space but by Pound's developing sense of the design of the poem.18 By 1918 he knew the poem had to begin with a vision of ghosts that brings the past to life in the present. His conception of the poem did not change when he decided to begin the poem with Odysseus pouring out the blood for the shade of Tiresias. In a draft oi Three Cantos Pound added the line "Thus will I speak with spirits" to the passage translated from the Odyssey.19

THREE CANTOS

113

Although he had settled on a way to begin the poem, Three Cantos I nevertheless reveals his hesitations about how to proceed. In the middle of this canto he returns to Browning's Sordello and meditates again on the problem of finding a form for his own poem: . . . shall I do your trick, the showman's booth, Bob Browning, Turned at my will into the Agora, Or into the old theatre at Aries, And set the lot, my visions, to confounding The wits that have survived your damn'd Sordello? (Or sulk and leave the word to novelists?) {Three Cantos 1,117-118) Given Pound's obsession with lifting poetry up to the level of sophistication of modern prose, this last alternative was probably the most tempting. Instead, he chose the first alternative, and structured the poem around visions—not visions presented in the "showman's booth" of Sordello, but intellectual visions that are firmly grounded in the present but skip quickly and easily from moment to moment in the past. Three Cantos isfinallycloser to thelnferno than toSordello, as the shades of figures long dead are given life and speech. As in "Provincia Deserta" Pound's position in the landscape of this underworld is firmly established; in Three Cantos I the place is not Perigord but Sirmione, the home of Catullus, the place where Pound ended Canzoni. This sacred place is where the ghosts patched with histories appear: And the place is full of spirits. Not kmures, not dark and shadowy ghosts, But the ancient living, wood-white, Smooth as the inner bark, and firm of aspect, And all agleam with colours—no, not agleam, But colored like the lake and like the olive leaves, Glaukopos, clothed like the poppies, wearing golden greaves, Light on the air. Are they Etruscan gods? {Three Cantos 1,116) The nature of Etruscan gods had been troubling Pound for some time. In 1911 he wrote that "no Etruscan god has as yet consented to

114

CHAPTER 5

be caught in a wicker basket. . . . Of course nobody does know much about Etruscan gods and its hardly Etruscan gods that I mean—but nobody seems to knowai all what kind of gods inhabit 'that section'. It is my own belief that they matched up with a metallic architecture that Pater hints at" (PSL, 43). The passage to which Pound refers in Pater's Plato and Platonism reveals what he means by "metallic architecture." The buildings of the city of Lacedaemon, writes Pater, were rude, strange things to look at, fashioned only, like the ceilings within, with axe and saw, of old mountain oak or pine from those great Taygetan forests, whence came also the abundant iron, which this stern people of iron and steel had superinduced on that earlier dreamy age of silver and gold—steel, however, admirably tempered and wrought. . . . Layer upon layer, relics of those earlier generations, a whole succession of remarkable races, lay beneath the strenuous footsteps of the present occupants, as there was old poetic legend in the depths of their seemily so practical or prosaic souls.20 For Pater, this layered city serves (much as La Gioconda does) as an emblem for his conception of history as a palimpsest of time periods; the city embodies the "general consciousness" of its inhabitants. It is constructed "layer upon layer" as Three Cantos is constructed "ply over ply." Pound uses this "metallic architecture" to describe the permanence of the ancient Etruscan gods; they inhabit the place, woven into the structure of its layered past. In Three Cantos I he feels the presence of these gods in Sirmione rather than Pater's Lacedaemon, but he emphasizes the palimpsest-like structure of that place by locating himself beside "the half-ruined chapel—. . . that splay, barn-like church the Renaissance / Had never quite got into trim again" (115). This church, San Pietro in Marvino, was built on the ruins of a pagan temple in the same way that Pater's Lacedaemonians laid their age of steel over the age of silver and gold, creating a layered city that embodied their cultural past. Architecture including history, Pound might have called it, and it is the dwelling place of the ancient living, the ghosts patched with histories. " 'Twas all I ever saw, but it was real," Pound

THREE CANTOS

115

remarks of his visions in Three Cantos I (117). As in "Psychology and Troubadours," the vision of the past is real because he saw it; there is no other measure of truth. While in Three Cantos I Pound uses Sirmione as the point in the present from which he surveys the past, the Dordogne Valley serves this purpose in Three Cantos II: Drear waste, great halls, Silk tatters still in the frame, Gonzaga's splendor Alight with phantoms! What have we of them, Or much or little? Where do we come upon the ancient people? (Three Cantos II, 180) Pound answers this question by presenting a sequence of visions that describe various figures from the past: Joios, a "lute girl," Catullus, St. Anthony, the Cid. Dordogne is where he comes upon the ancient people: So the murk opens. Dordoigne! When I was there, There came a centaur, spying the land, And there were nymphs behind him. Or going on the road by Salisbury Procession on procession— For that road was full of peoples, Ancient in various days, long years between them. Ply over ply of life still wraps the earth here. Catch at Dordoigne. (Three Cantos II, 182) In the late nineteenth century, caves filled with primitive paintings, unseen for 25,000 years, were discovered in the Dordogne Valley. Eliot visited these caves in 1919 and emerged, as Hugh Kenner has suggested, with the notion that "art never improves."21 These caves are also the place where Gaudier-Brzeska located the origins of his art in "Gaudier-Brzeska Vortex," a history of sculpture published in the 1914 issue of Blast: "The PALEOLITHIC VORTEX resulted in the decoration of the Dordogne caverns" (GB, 20). When Pound reprinted

116

CHAPTER 5

this essay in his memoir of Gaudier, he remarked that the sculptor had a remarkable ability for "historical synthesis" and had "put the whole history of sculpture in three pages" (GB, 106). Pound sought to create the same effect in Three Cantos. Locating himself at Dordogne, he watches the "ancient people" appear from within that ancient landscape (Joios, Catullus, St. Anthony), and he presents these visions "ply over ply," without explanation or transition. These cantos are Pound's fullest expression of the "historical sense" adumbrated in poems such as "Speech for Psyche" and "Rome" in Canzoni. Like San Pietro in Marvino, like the Dordogne Valley, they are built out of layers of the past, grafted one to the other. No trace of a chronological schema is present. Instead, the "ancient people" reappear in the present, blooded by the imaginative vision of the poet. In Three Cantos the imagination is in the service of the historical sense (the historical sense "is the imagination and the imagination is the result of heredity," wrote Wilde);22 for Pound, all ages are contemporaneous in the mind of the visionary. Pound discovered another model for his antichronological pastiche of historical visions in the work of Allen Upward. When Pound first met this philosopher-anthropologist in 1913 he remarked that he "seems to [know] things that ain't in Frazer" (PSL, 259). In Upward's The New Word (1910) Pound found an ally for his battle against the "archeological" method of modern philology: The man of letters will need no explanation of why I have found the dogma of philology to be the devil's leading counsel in this debate. . . . [The philologist] is bitten by the mania for exactness, and his study is the one study in which exactness must almost certainly be wrong. When he rules out the guesses of the untrained mind, he is ruling out the mind that shaped those very words of his; he is condemning what ought to be his fundamental law.23 In The Divine Mystery (1913) Upward proposed a method of interpretation that complements Pound's own method of "visionary interpretation": "prophets ought to be interpreted by prophets, instead of by grammarians."24 Like Pound, Upward held an uncommon faith in the traditionally sanctioned magical powers of the artist, and he presented himself as an inspired interpreter of the past.

THREE CANTOS

117

When Pound reviewed The Divine Mystery he called it "the most fascinating book on folk-lore that I have ever opened. I can scarcely call it a book on 'folk-lore', it is a consummation. It is a history of the development of the human intelligence" (SP, 403). This is exactly what Pound was trying to fabricate in Three Cantos, and Upward confirmed the idea of the "general consciousness" or "great memory" that he had gleaned from Pater and Yeats: To the thoughtful mind all history is sacred. . . . There is a universe within him as without; the network of his frame is a battleground wherein unseen and uncalculated forces meet and struggle for the mastery; his very thoughts are not his own, but the reincarnations of ancestral spirits, or else of the angels of heavenly and hellish powers. The "ghostly footsteps" of our ancestors, Upward concludes, "yet haunt the broken pavement, the air is heavy with their sighs." All the past is contained within the mind of the inspired interpreter, and consequently he may understand history as "a vertical section, for all these stages of emotion and belief are present at the same time in the collective and individual conscience of mankind." Upward narrates his history in The Divine Mystery in a fashion that "is rather logical than chronological" in order to be true to the way he experiences the past within the structure of his own mind.25 The Cantos, Pound's own "history of the development of human intelligence," takes the same shape because like Upward, he presents the spiritual manifestations of his ancestors, the ancient living who lurk in the collective unconscious. "We do NOT know the past in chronological sequence," Pound would write in his Guide to Kulchur, "but what we know we know by ripples and spirals eddying out from us and from our time" (GK, 60). In Three Cantos those spirals and eddies often seem alarmingly random, and it is now a critical commonplace that Three Cantos was a hesitant attempt at a poem including history. Pound did become dissatisfied with its form; however, the hesitations apparent in Three Cantos are in some ways calculated and not merely an indication of Pound's inability to structure his work. In Three Cantos I Pound wor-

CHAPTER 5

118

ries that his visions of the past are purely the products of his own consciousness and have no historical validity: What have I of this life, Or even of Guido? Sweet lie!—Was I there truly? Did I know Or San Michele? Let's believe it. Believe the tomb he leapt was Julia Laeta's? Friend, I do not even—when he led that street charge— I do not even know which sword he'd with him. Sweet lie, "I lived!" Sweet lie, "I lived beside him." And now it's all but truth and memory, Dimmed only by the attritions of long time. "But we forget not." No, take it all for lies, I have but smelt this life, a whiff of it— The box of scented wood Recalls cathedrals. And shall I claim; Confuse my own phantastikon, Or say the filmy shell that circumscribes me Contains the actual sun; confuse the thing I see With actual gods behind me? (Three Cantos 1,120) Pound wonders if his visions are merely "sweet lies"; he questions whether or not the traditionally sanctioned visionary powers of the poet are validation enough for him to confuse his own "phantastikon" with a dim and distant past. Pound has reached the same point Croce reached in his later work when he realized that it was not enough to say that history was an art and not a science; the historical imagination needed to be "radically distinguished from the free poetic imagination, dear to those historians who see and hear the face and the voice of Jesus on the Lake of Tiberias, or follow Heraclitus on his daily walks among the hills of Ephesus, or repeat again the secret colloquies between Francis of Assisi and the sweet Umbrian countryside."26 The last line oiTJiree Cantos I ("O Casella!") shows that Pound had

THREE CANTOS

119

already prepared to extricate himself from this dilemma. This line refers to the second canto of lhtPurgatorio where Dante attempts to embrace the shade of Casella: Io vidi una di lor trarresi avante per abbracciarmi, con si grande affetto, che mosse me a far Io somigliante. Ohi ombre vane, fuor che ne l'aspetto! tre volte dietro a lei Ie mani awinsi, e tante mi tornai con esse al petto. [I saw one of them with such great affection drawing forward to embrace me that he moved me to do the same. O empty shades except in aspect! Three times I clasped my hands behind him and as often brought them back to my breast.]27 This passage is emblematic of Pound's fears: his ghosts patched with histories might be as lacking in real substance as Casella. Three Cantos II opens with the injunction to "Leave Casella" but it is not until Three Cantos III that Pound leaves his ghosts behind for a method of historical reconstruction that is more reliably concrete. Three Cantos III begins in the manner of the previous two cantos with a meditation on the visions of the seventeenth-century Rosicrucian John Heydon. Pound then "takes the old way" of the dream-vision once again and offers his own vision of Heydon: Take the old way, say I met John Heydon, Sought out the place, Lay on the bank, was "plunged deep in swevyn;" And saw the company—Layamon, Chaucer— Pass each in his appropriate robes; Conversed with each, observed the varying fashion. And then comes Heydon. (Three Cantos III, 248) This passage is followed by an account of Lorenzo the Magnificent's vision of Ficino, and here Pound's dissatisfaction with ghostly visions becomes clear: he calls Lorenzo's use of the dream-vision "the dodge." While Pound himself admitted that he had experienced these

120

CHAPTER 5

visions, the skeptical part of his personality remained unconvinced. His use of visions in Three Cantos seemed to him a "dodge," a metaphor for historical reconstruction masquerading as an actual methodology. The visions were attractive to Pound because they emphasized his personal "experience" of the past, but he knew that he needed "more earth and sounder rhetoric" (Three Cantos III, 249). Pound finds that ground in the second half of Three Cantos III, which opens with a meditation on the Renaissance humanist Lorenzo Valla's Elegantiae linguae fatinae and ends with the translation from the Odyssey which now stands as Canto 1. Pound has left Casella behind, but it is important to see that by substituting textual translation for intellectual vision Pound has altered his method of historical reconstruction in kind but not in nature: the vision remains but it is now based on "more earth and sounder rhetoric." Pound needed to emphasize that his textual recreation of the past was not the deadened work of the philologist, and he explored the subtle connection he sensed between mystical experience and translation in "Aux Etuves de Wiesbaden" [sic], another imaginary conversation published in the Ltttle Review at the same time that Three Cantos was appearing in Poetry. "Aux Etuves de Wiesbaden" presents a dialogue between the humanist Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459) and "Le Sieur de Maunsier," and it is based on Poggio's frequently reprinted Latin letter describing the public baths in the Swiss city of Baden.28 The link between this dialogue and Three Cantos is explicit. While Pound complained in Three Cantos I that "the modern world I Needs such a rag-bag to stuff all its thought in," Poggio remarks in "Aux Etuves de Wiesbaden" that he is "a rag-bag, a mass of sights and citations" and maintains that he can find no Platonic model on which to hang an organized conception of the world. When his interlocutor asks him if he would be "without an ideal" Poggio replies, Is beauty an ideal like the rest? I confess I see the need of no other. When I read that from the breast of Princess Hellene there was cast a cup of "white gold," the sculptor finding no better model; and that this cup was long shown in the temple at Lyndos, which is in

THREE CANTOS

121

the island of Rhodes; or when I read, as I think is the textual order, first of the cup and then of its origin, there comes upon me a discontent with human imperfection. I am no longer left in the "slough of the senses," but am full of heroic life, for the instant. The sap mounts in the twigs of my being. The visions of the mystics gave them like courage, it may be. . . . I have seen many women in dreams, surpassing most mortal women, but I doubt if I have on their account been stirred to more thoughts of beauty, than I have had meditating upon that passage in Latin, concerning the temple of Pallas at Lyndos and its memorial cup of white gold. (PD, 102-103) The passage in Latin to which Pound's Poggio refers is taken from Pliny's Natural History: Minervae templum habet Lindos insulae Rhodiorum, in quo Helena sacravit calicem ex electro; adicit historia, mammae suae mensura. Electri natura est ad lucernarum lumina clarius argento splendere. [There is a temple of Athena at Lindus of the island of Rhodes in which there is a goblet made of electrum, dedicated by Helen; history further relates that it has the same measurements as her breast. A quality of electrum is that it shines more brightly than silver in lamplight.]29 Pound would refer to the golden breast of Helen in the temple of Pallas Athena at Lindus several times throughout the later cantos; it remained important to him as a human rather than transcendental ideal of beauty, an analogue for his own attempt to write a "paradiso terrestre." Poggio's discussion of this passage in "Aux Etuves de Wiesbaden" provides an even more elucidating analogue for the argument of Three Cantos III. In Pound's dialogue Poggio explains that meditating upon the Latin passage is an experience similar to mystical vision. By juxtaposing the visions ofJohn Heydon with his own translation of Divus's Latin Odyssey in Three Cantos III Pound makes the same point, revealing that his translation is not simply a philological effort but a product of the artist's magical ability to conjure up the

122

CHAPTER 5

past. The translation is meant to give the same effect as a vision of "ghosts patched with histories" while being based on "more earth and sounder rhetoric." The visions of the past in Three Cantos I and II were finally a "dodge" for Pound, a metaphor for historical reconstruction that ignored the concrete particulars (reading, translation) of his actual method of including history in his poem. The problem with emphasizing the textual reality of his methodology, on the other hand, was that unlike the vision of ghosts, it could seem scholarly rather than poetic, lifeless rather than passionate, the work of the philologist rather than the prophet. Pound tried to avoid this danger in two ways. First, the subject matter of the translation (the pouring of blood for ghosts) offers an analogue for the act of translation itself; coming at the end of Three Cantos , the ghost of Tiresias is the last of numerous ghosts patched with histories whom Pound has raised from the dead. In the form in which the translation from Divus's Latin Odyssey appeared in Three Cantos III, this connection was made even clearer, for the translation included this passage (deleted from thefinalversion of Canto 1) in which Odysseus attempts to embrace the ghost of his mother: Came then Anticlea, to whom I answered: "Fate drives me on through these deeps; I sought Tiresias." I told her news of Troy, and thrice her shadow Faded in my embrace. Then had I news of many faded women— Tyro, Alcmena, Chloris— Heard out their tales by that dark fosse, and sailed By sirens and thence outward and away, And unto Circe buried Elpenor's corpse. (Three Cantos III, 253-254) This passage provided Dante with the model for his own attempt to embrace the elusive shade of Casella in the Purgatorio. Though Pound commanded his poem to "Leave Casella" in Three Cantos II, he is able to embrace that spirit successfully in the act of translation in Three Cantos III.

THREE CANTOS

123

The varied meanings of the word "translation" itself reveal the second way in which Pound stresses that his rendition of Divus's Latin is a kind of visionary experience. He invokes these meanings through his juxtaposition of the translation with the visions of John Heydon. The apparition of the Lady Philosophy figure, which Pound adapts from Heydon's Holy Guide, ends with this sentence: "but her hour of Translation was come, and taking as I thought our last leave, she past before my eyes into the /Ether of Nature."30 The word "translation," Pound knew, was traditionally used to refer not only to the transmission of texts from language to language but also the transmission of spirits from earth into heaven. In 1913 Dorothy Shakespear told Pound that Georgie Hyde-Lees (the woman whom Yeats would marry in 1917) "had an amusing dream about you two nights ago. You were hanging to the top of a very straight pine tree—all-stem-&-a-burst-ofbranches-at-the-top-kind, and you had not climbed it—but had got there 'by translation' as she says" (PSL, 269). Pound designed Three Cantos to show that he included the past in his poem by "translation"—in both senses of the word. As Poggio remarks, meditating on the Latin Odyssey gives him the certainty of "the visions of the mystics." The passage taken from the Odyssey is the first of innumerable texts that Pound would include in The Cantos. And the structure of Three Cantos reminds us that for Pound, the act of translating the past into the present depended not only upon the careful skills of the scholar but on the visionary intensity of the mystic. It is important to notice that Pound has Poggio, a Renaissance humanist, make the explicit connection between textual study and mystical experience in "Aux Etuves de Wiesbaden." Pound wrote in Provincialism the Enemy that "the humanist ideals of the Renaissance are sounder than any that have been evolved in an attempt to raise 'monuments' of scholarship" (SP, 195). He wanted to overthrow philological method and return to the passionate historicism of the humanists. Poggio was famous, as Pound knew from studies of the Renaissance by Burckhardt, Symonds, and Villari, for his excursions to monasteries in Switzerland and Germany in search of ancient texts. He was single-handedly responsible, in Burckhardt's words, for discovering "six

124

CHAPTER 5

orations of Cicero and the first complete Quintilian. . . . He was able to make important additions to Silius Italicus, Manilius, Lucretius, Valerius, Flaccus, Asconius, Pedianus, Columella, Celsus, Aulus GeIlius, Statius, and others."31 In the Renaissance in Italy Symonds remarks that "the humanists went forth with the instinct of explorers to release the captives and awake the dead. From the convent libraries of Italy, from the museums of Constantinople, from the abbeys of Germany and Switzerland and France, the slumbering spirits of the ancients had to be evoked."32 In Three Cantos III Pound likewise emphasizes that his reclamation of Divus's Latin Odyssey is an awakening of the dead. And in order to emphasize that his translation is closer to the work of the Renaissance humanists than the nineteenth-century philologists, he prefaces the lines from Homer with a meditation on Lorenzo Valla (1406-1457), a humanist who, like Poggio, was employed by Pope Nicholas V to translate the Greek masterpieces into Latin. Pound first read Valla's Elegantiae linguae fatinae (1444) in 1911 when he was working on an eventually abandoned book about the Renaissance: "I am trying to read the seven prefaces to Valla's 'Elegantiae' but I really don't see how I can be expected to feign an interest, and it is a matter of utter indifference to me whether the latin tongue is to be regarded as a great sacrament or a great pest" (PSL, 43). This opinion would change radically. In his 1914 essay on "The Renaissance" Pound invoked Valla as one of the models for his own effort to spark a second Renaissance in the arts: The scholars of the quattrocento had just as stiff a stupidity and contentment and ignorance to contend with [as we do today]. It is in the biographies of Erasmus and Lorenzo Valla that we must find consolation. They were willing to work at foundations. They did not give the crowd what it wanted. The middle ages had been a jumble. There may have been a charming diversity, but there was also the darkness of decentralization. There had been minute vortices at such castles as that of Savairic de Maleon, and later at the universities. But the rinascimento began when Valla wrote in the preface of the Elegantiae: Linguam Latinam distribuise minus erit, optimamfrugem, et vere

THREE CANTOS

125

divinam nee corporis, sed animi eibum?Haec enimgentespopulosque omnes, omnibus artibus, quae liberaks vocantur, instituit: haec optimas leges edocuit: haec viam ad omnem sapientiam munivit, haec deniquepraestitit, ne barbari amphus diet possent.. . . In qua lingua disciplinae cunctae libero homine dignae continetur. . . . Linguam Romanam vivere plus, quam urbem. "Magnum ergo Latini sermonis sacramentum est." "Ibi namque Romanum imperium est, ubicunque Romana lingua dominatur." That is not "the revival of classicism". It is not a worship of corpses. It is an appreciation of the great Roman vortex, an understanding of, and an awakening to, the value of a capital, the value of centralization, in matters of knowledge and art, and of the interaction and stimulus of genius foregathered. (LE, 220) For Pound, Valla's work was not what he had been taught as philology, not the worship of corpses depicted in Three Cantos I with the story of Ignez da Castro. In Three Cantos III when Pound turns from the visions of John Heydon to the "sounder rhetoric" of Valla, he makes the same point in order to show that his rendition of Divus's Homer is not meant to puzzle scholars but spark a Renaissance. Valla, Pound knew, had translated the Iliad into Latin (LE, 265), and Pound now translates Divus's Latin Odyssey into an Anglo-Saxon inflected English. In his meditation on Valla he includes several lines from the first preface to the Ekgantiae, translated from the Latin, which he quotes in "The Renaissance": Valla, more earth and sounder rhetoric— Prefacing praise to the Pope Nicholas: "A man of parts, skilled in the subtlest sciences; A patron of the arts, of poetry; and of a fine discernment." Then comes a catalogue, his jewels of conversation. No, you've not read your Elegantiae— A dull book?—shook the church. The prefaces, cut clear and hard: "Know then the Roman speech, a sacrament," Spread for the nations, eucharist of wisdom, Bread of the liberal arts.

126

CHAPTER 5

"More than the Roman city, the Roman speech" (Holds fast its part among the ever-living). "Not by the eagles only was Rome measured." "Wherever the Roman speech was, there was Rome." (Three Cantos III, 249-250) Pound thought of himself as a humanist for his own time. (As early as 1912 he remarked that "I shall end as a sort of Pietro Bembo to this saeclum inane, i.e. 'this rotten age' " [PSL, 147].) Like Valla, he is "sustaining speech" and building the London Vortex as Valla built the Renaissance in Rome. And while Valla maintained that civilization flourished where the Latin language flourished, Pound was creating a new common language in Three Cantos, reaching back to Homer and out to France and Italy and even Japan. Where this language flourished, provincialism would be subsumed by an international civilization, a second Renaissance. In an essay titled "Analysis of this Decade" (1915) Pound surveyed the humanists' reclamation of classical learning in the Renaissance and compared their efforts with the work he and his collaborators were attempting in London: "we have begun deliberately to try to free ourselves from the Renaissance shackles, as the Renaissance fieed itself from the Middle Ages." A second Renaissance must be in part a reaction against the first, though Pound also points out that "we are still a continuation of certain Renaissance phases" and that "we still follow one or two dicta of Pico or Valla" (GB, 114). Valla remained important for Pound because he showed how the study of language and the transmission of culture could be an overtly political act: By the "harmless" study of language, he dissipated the donation of Constantine. The revival of Roman Law, while not his private act, was made possible or accelerated by him. His dictum that eloquence and dialectic were one—i.e., that good sense is the backbone of eloquence—is still worth considering. Pound concluded that the "finest force" in the Renaissance "came from Lorenzo Valla" (GB, 113). Valla's treatise on the "Donation of Constantine" (Defalso credita et ementia constantini donatione, 1440) proved that this document, which the Papacy had invoked for centu-

THREE CANTOS

127

ries as the justification for their temporal powers, was a forgery. By "his close inspection of Latin usage," said Pound, "Lorenzo Valla somewhat altered the course of history" (LE, 192). Valla showed Pound that the mot juste is indeed "of public utility" (PJ, 200).33 Pound also hoped to do with his poem including history what Valla had done by close inspection of Latin. Extending the task that he believed Henry James had begun, Pound wanted to write a poem to unite the cultures of America, Europe, and the Orient. As he wrote in Provincialism the Enemy, he wanted Three Cantos to present humanity as "a collection of individuals, not a whole divided into segments or units" (SP, 200). The creation of this common language, Pound believed, would help prevent future wars. In the brief biography he wrote in 1949 to accompany his Selected Poems, Pound remarked that in 1918 he "began investigation of causes of war, to oppose same."34 Although they were published in 1917, Three Cantos was the first fruit of this investigation. And although Pound would scuttle these cantos, beginning the poem with his rendition of Divus's Homer, the growth of The Cantos would be guided—for better and worse—by Pound's belief that the crusade to save language was synonymous with the crusade against war, that a poem including history could change history. One of the reasons that Pound moved the Homeric passage to the beginning of the poem was to emphasize the importance of understanding the present world through the past; The Cantos now begin with the lines from Homer that Pound thought were older than any others. His translation of this passage also emphasizes that the process of reclaiming the past is as important as the reclamation itself. Canto 1 shows us that error is an integral part of the process of reconstructing history; it embodies Eliot's dictum that "a 'perfect understanding' of a foreign literature or of an earlier period of our own, is an unattainable ideal: sometimes the way in which it is mis-understood is the important thing."35 The way Pound prefaces his translation of Divus's Homer in Three Cantos III makes this aspect of the final version of Canto 1 clearer. In his meditation on Valla Pound writes, "Broken in middle life? bent to submission?— Took a fat living from the Papacy"

128

CHAPTER 5

(That's in Villari, but Burckhardt's statement is different) . . . (Three Cantos III, 250) Pound refers to the fact that after he wrote his condemnation of the Donation, depriving the Papacy of their time-honored claim to temporal power, Valla later became secretary to Pope Nicholas V. But Pound also points out that the facts of this "conversion" are not clear and that it may not be possible to determine whether or not Valla sacrificed his ideals to earn a "fat living" from the Papacy (just as it was not possible to decide if Bertran de Born's poem was motivated by love or war in "Near Perigord"). While Burckhardt states rather neutrally that "in spite of everything, at last even Lorenzo Valla, filled the same office" of secretary to the Pope, Villari reports that Valla retracted "all the perilous doctrines which he had hitherto maintained, especially those touching on the donation of Constantine."36 From the start Pound emphasizes that the history he includes in his poem is equivocal; that the act of writing history, translating documents, or visualizing ghosts makes history. This aspect of Pound's early historicism becomes even clearer as Three Cantos III moves on from Valla to the translation of Homer: Justinopolitan Uncatalogued Andreas Divus, Gave him Latin, 1538 in my edition, the rest uncertain, Caught up his cadence, word and syllable: "Down to the ships we went, set mast and sail, Black keel and beasts for bloody sacrifice, Weeping we went." I've strained my ear for -ensa, -ombra, and -ensa And cracked my wit on delicate canzoni— Here's but rough meaning: "And then went down to the ship, set keel to breakers, Forth on the godly sea; We set up mast and sail on the swarthy ship, Sheep bore we aboard her, and our bodies also Heavy with weeping." (Three Cantos III, 250-251)

THREE CANTOS

129

Here Pound offers two versions of the opening lines of the eleventh book of the Odyssey in order to emphasize that what he offers is indeed "rough meaning." He tells us that he translates from an edition of Divus that is "uncertain," and he emphasizes that the translation is the work of one idiosyncratic reader who knows his Prove^al grammar but whose knowledge of Latin is left in question. Should "ship," we must wonder, be singular as it is in the second version of the lines, or plural as it is in the first? Is the first line of each version ("Down to the ships we went, set mast and sail" and "And then went down to the ship, set keel to breakers") a translation of the same phrase, or has the translator pulled up a phrase from line three of the second version into line one of the first? Are "beasts" in the second line of the first version synonymous with "sheep" in the second line of the second version? Pound's point seems to be that this kind of accuracy is not so important as the necessity of preserving the oldest bit of narrative in the western world. The process of transmission necessarily includes error, and Pound prefers a translation that offers a blooded vision of the past to one that is merely accurate. Pound read his Homer in the original Greek as well as in Divus's Latin; in a 1914 letter to Yeats he translated one line from the eleventh book of the Odyssey directly from the Greek: "The departing soul hovers about as a dream."37 Consequently, he would have known, as Hugh Kenner has pointed out in his own comparison of Divus's Latin with Homer's Greek, that Divus erred in translating "dian" as "divum"; yet Pound followed Divus's error, rendering the phrase "in mare divum" as "on the godly sea" rather than "on the bright sea."38 He recognized that Divus's Latin was a "crib" for Homer's Greek that permitted "a man to read fast enough to get the swing and mood of the subject, instead of losing both in a dictionary" (LE, 264). Pound wants us to read his crib in the same way. To forge a second Renaissance—and to do so in the face of a war that threatened to destroy the work of the first—Pound wants his readers to grasp the swing and mood of the past, not bury their heads in dictionaries. That is easy to say about Canto 1, which can be understood and appreciated without a great deal of learning. As The Cantos progresses,

130

CHAPTER 5

however, Pound places greater and greater demands on his readers. While Canto 1 provides a metaphor and model for some of the historical reconstruction that will take place in the poem, it is important to see that Pound's methods for including history in The Cantos changed radically throughout the fifty years of its composition. The 1917 version of the first Three Cantos and even the final version of Cantos 1 through 7 remain the product of the historicism Pound had been formulating since I Gather the Limbs of Osiris. Perhaps the most important premise of this existential historicism is that history is written by an individual historian in a specific place and time. Pound emphasized that premise in Three Cantos, making his own role as visionary or translator an integrated part of the poem. As The Cantos progressed, Pound would increasingly remove the signs of his own personal involvement in the process of including history in the poem— and he would often conceal the inevitable role of error in that process. Pulling the translation of Divus from the context of Three Cantos was one of the first steps in this direction. In some of the later cantos Pound would emerge as a historical positivist, collecting a vast structure of unadulterated facts, rather than the inspired historian, breathing his life into the past. It was the earlier Pound, the Pound of Three Cantos and I Gather the Limbs of Osiris, who was most influential in forming the historical sense of T. S. Eliot, who then codified it for the modernist movement at large. But before we turn to Eliot, let us first examine the way Pound abandoned the principles of his early historicism. While some of Pound's readers believe that the power of The Cantos lies in its denial of "the centrality of personal emotion" to poetry, I wonder if that may not have been one of Pound's most revealing mistakes.39 When Pound forsook the humanist ideal of the individual held up in Provincialism the Enemy and embodied in Three Cantos, he surrendered his war against philology and picked up the banner of far more unattractive causes.

Chapter Six

Truth and Calliope

During the initial gestation period of The Cantos, from late in 1911 when Pound first asked Dorothy Shakespear if she had any suggestions for his "long poem" (PSL, 82) to the summer of 1917 when the first cantos were published, Pound discovered ways of including history in his poem almost everywhere he looked: in Browning, Pater, Yeats, the Renaissance humanists, the Japanese Noh plays, and even the landscape of Provence. He pursued the task of planning a modern long poem with Miltonic ambition. Beginning with the winter of 1915 Pound also recognized other sources for his desire to write a poem including history in the nineteenth-century literary tradition he so often spurned. During their last two winters together at Stone Cottage in Sussex (1914-1915 and 19151916) Pound and Yeats read a great deal of Landor, and in Landor's imaginary conversations Pound discovered yet another avenue to the past. He went on to translate a dozen of Fontenelle's Dialogues des Mortes and then wrote two of his own imaginary conversations ("An Anachronism at Chinon" and "Aux Etuves de Wiesbaden"), which, as we have seen, provide an elucidating gloss for Three Cantos. Landor's own historicism cast its effect over these efforts. One of the speakers in Landor's "Pericles and Aspasia" makes a statement about the relationship between poetry and history that describes Three Cantos as well as it describes Landor's imaginary conversations: Remarkable men of remote ages are collected together out of different countries within the same period, and perform simultaneously the same action. On an accumulation of obscure deeds arises a wild spirit of poetry; and images and names burst forth and spread themselves, which carry with them something like enchantment, far beyond the infancy of nations. What was vague imagination settles at last and is received for history. It is difficult to effect

132

CHAPTER 6

and idle to attempt the separation: it is like breaking off a beautiful crystallisation from the vault of some intricate and twilight cavern, out of mere curiosity to see where the accretion terminates and the rock begins. Landor concluded that we "make a bad bargain when we change poetry for truth in the affairs of ancient times,"1 and as we have seen, Pound made the same point at the end of Three Cantos. Though his opinion in these matters would soon change, the Pound oiThree Cantos asserts the priority of Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, over truth. Like Landor, he was more interested in making a wild poetry of historical figures who throbbed with life than in constructing a philological treatise weighed down by questions of historical accuracy. Pound's interest in Landor led him to recognize how his own effort to compose a poem including history situated him firmly in a Romantic tradition. In 1917 he published in The Future a series of essays on what might be called the "other tradition" in Romantic poetry: Landor, Beddoes, and Crabbe. He began his essay on Crabbe by acknowledging that he had been unjust in his complete dismissal of the Romantics in previous essays: It is not long since a distinguished editor announced that he was going to attack me. He was going to attack me for a phrase in one of my articles entitled the "American Chaos." I had said that "since the death of Lawrence Sterne or thereabouts, there has been neither in England nor America any sufficient sense of the value of realism in literature, of the value of writing words that conform precisely with fact, of free speech without evasions and circumlocutions." I had no intention of insulting anyone in particular. I did not say that we could not find harassed and isolated individuals with a sufficient comprehension of the value of precise writing. It is the function and duty of every man with any trace of intelligence from time to time to insult the circumjacent stupidity. I hold that to be axiomatic. Also I said "thereabouts." I had forgotten, or at least for the moment I was not thinking of, the Rev. Crabbe, LL.B.2

TRUTHANDCALLIOPE

133

Pound goes on to praise Crabbe for his "realism," lamenting the fact that Browning did not choose Crabbe over Shelley as his master. In the essays on Beddoes and Landor, the reasons for Pound's reappraisal of the Romantics becomes clearer. Beddoes was one of Pound's earliest enthusiasms (he first read him during his second year at Hamilton College in 1904), and when he returned to Beddoes's Death's Jest-Book in 1917, he found another precedent for a poem organized around visions of ghosts "patched with histories." In 1904 Pound had marked this passage in Death's Jest-Book and he quoted it in his 1917 essay on Beddoes, commenting that "these lines. . . bring us directly to the question: Can a man write poetry in a purely archaic dialect?" and I utter Shadows of words, like to an ancient ghost, Arisen out of hoary centuries Where none can speak his language. (SP, 381)3 In Three Cantos Pound was giving language to ancient ghosts as well as attempting to write poetry in an archaic dialect. The passage he translated from Divus's Homer combined both efforts, rendering the speech of Tiresias's shade in the Anglo-Saxon rhythms of "The Seafarer." Pound saw in Beddoes the roots of a poetry that finds its inspiration in history. In his essay on Landor he made more general comments on the nineteenth-century origins of the historical sense: I find in a rather rare book of criticism, published in 1885, some remarks on the poet's "power of looking out of his own age, and of reaching the standpoint of another." The author of this book says that Shelley seemed to have a foretaste of it. He then states that with Tennyson, Browning and Arnold, English poetry entered a new phase: "We could not say of the English poets, before these, that they had been interpreters of any age but their own." Surely all this glory is Landor's. Surely no man has ever interpreted more different eras with sureness and thoroughness, whether it be in "Pericles and Aspasia," or his dialogues between

134

CHAPTER 6

Chaucer, Petrarch and Boccaccio, or in the Normandy dialogue, which is contemporary and almost a novel. (SP, 386-387) For Pound, Landor was the originator of the modern "historical sense" that he was now bringing to fruition in his own work. But even more important than what these paragraphs tell us about Pound's view of Landor is what they tell us about Pound's own ambitions: the sentences he quotes from the "rather rare book of criticism" published in 1885 about the poet's "power of looking out of his own age and of reaching the standpoint of another" provide a perfect description of his own work. In fact, they describe the process of visionary interpretation that Pound had been exploring ever since "Histrion." The only other clue Pound provides about this rare book is that it was written by "an admirer of Matthew Arnold's" (SP, 387), and that is evidence enough to deduce that the book from which he quotes is Urbana Scripta (1885) by Arthur Galton. Galton, whom Pound met soon after he arrived in London in 1909, had known Arnold personally, and he was so enamored of the late Victorian that Pound followed the practice of the Shakespear family in calling him "Mat-Mat" (PSL, 344). Urbana Scripta is a pleasant appreciation of Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Swinburne, and Morris, but the fact that Pound probably read it soon after he arrived in London and remembered it well enough to quote from it eight years later indicates the importance it held for him. In his introduction to Urbana Scripta Galton stresses the importance of the "critical spirit" of the great Victorians: "we cannot say that Wordsworth interpreted any age except his own: he was not, in our sense, critical." But Shelley, says Galton, had a foretaste of the "critical spirit" and he gave (to reiterate the passage from which Pound quotes) something to our poetry which no English poet had given before: the power of looking out of his own age, and of reaching the standpoint of another. . . . It is this power which we may call the new phase in poetry, and it is shown especially in three of our living poets: in Lord Tennyson, in Mr. Browning, in Mr. Matthew Arnold.4

TRUTHANDCALLIOPE

135

Despite the credit he gives to Shelley, Galton was indeed an ad­ mirer of Arnold, for his conception of the "critical spirit" is taken from Arnold's "On the Modern Element in Literature" (1857). For Arnold, the supreme achievement of the modern age is the "manifestation of critical spirit," which leads men to see that "everywhere there is con­ nexion, everywhere there is illustration: no single event, no single lit­ erature, is adequately comprehended except in its relation to other events, to other literatures."5 Wilde, another admirer of Arnold, sec­ onded the importance of the "critical spirit" in his "The Critic as Art­ ist" (1890), where he proclaimed that it "can help us to leave the age in which we were born, and to pass into other ages, and find ourselves not exiled from their air." 6 Pound exercised this "critical spirit" with visionary intensity throughout his early work, and despite his arcane interests he remained the heir of so familiar a tradition as Arnold's. Although Pound aban­ doned most of Three Cantos when he rewrote the beginning of the poem for Λ Draft of XVI Cantos, the revised cantos remain marked by the visionary sense of the past that gave Three Cantos their structure. The final version of Canto 3 preserves the vision of the "ancient liv­ ing" over the waters of Lake Garda, which originally stood in Three Cantos I. Here, however, Pound transposes the scene to Venice: Gods float on the azure air, Bright gods and Tuscan, back before dew was shed. Light: and the first light, before ever dew was fallen. Panisks, and from the oak, dryas, And from the apple, maelid, Through all the wood, and the leaves are full of voices, Α-whisper, and the clouds bowe over the lake, And there are gods upon them, And in the water, the almond-white swimmers, The silvery water glazes the upturned nipple, As Poggio remarked. (3/11) When Canto 3 first appeared in this form in A Draft of XVI Cantos the line referring to one of Pound's humanist masters ("As Poggio re­ marked") was not present. Pound added it in order to emphasize that

CHAPTER 6

136

this vision of the gods has been sustained throughout history. Poggio saw it as he set out to reclaim the classics for his Renaissance, and now Pound has seen it as he writes the poem that he hopes will spark another cultural rebirth. Canto 7 is the most intensely visionary of the early cantos. In the haunted houses of postwar London, Pound meets the ghost of Henry James, the modern Tiresias. In his 1918 essay on James, Pound quotes A. R. Orage's remark that "James will be quite comfortable after death, as he has been dealing with ghosts all his life" (LE, 302). And in Canto 7 Pound generalizes on the "ghostly visits" in The Sense of the Past and "The Jolly Corner," once again employing the metaphor of ghosts "patched with histories" to describe the workings of historicism: We also made ghostly visits, and the stair That knew us, found us again on the turn of it, Knocking at empty rooms, seeking for buried beauty; And the sun-tanned, gracious and well-formed fingers Lift no latch of bent bronze, no Empire handle Twists for the knocker's fall; no voice to answer. A strange concierge, in place of the gouty-footed. Sceptic against all this one seeks the living, Stubborn against the fact. (7/25) Throughout Canto 7 the ghosts of the dead are more vital than the dry husks of the men who walk the streets of modern London. Pound presents an apparition of the spirit ofJeanne Heyse (who also went by the names Joan Hayes and lone de Forest, though Pound here calls her Nicea), a French dancer who had committed suicide in 1912, contrasting the vitality of this vision of the past with the dull rounds of the present:7 Nicea moved before me And the cold grey air troubled her not For all her naked beauty, bit not the tropic skin, And the long slender feet lit on the curb's marge And her moving height went before me,

TRUTH AND CALLIOPE

137

We alone having being. And all that day, another day: Thin husks I had known as men, Dry casques of departed locusts speaking a shell of speech. . . (7/26) Throughout the first seven cantos, Pound continues to include history in the poem in a way that stresses the intensity with which the poet-historian must approach his material. When Canto 4 was published in A Draft of XVI Cantos Pound added two lines to its conclusion that emphasize his own personal involvement in the poem: And we sit here. . . there in the arena. . . (4/16) Like Three Cantos, Canto 4 is a complicated pastiche of scenes from myth and history, but unlike Three Cantos, Pound's personal presence as the poem's narrator, breathing life into the past, is not emphasized. These lines reintroduce Pound as the visionary historian who sits near the arena in Verona watching these scenes from the past acted out before him. Although the lines refer to a particular visit Pound made to the arena with Bride Scratton and T. S. Eliot, he may also have had this passage from Gibbon's autobiography in mind: I can neither forget nor express the strong emotions which agitated my mind as I first approached, and entered the eternal city. After a sleepless night, I trod, with a lofty step, the ruins of the Forum; each memorable spot where Romulus stood, or Tully spoke, or Caesar fell, was at once present to my eye.8 Throughout Canto 4, and by extension throughout much ofThe Cantos (Pound repeats the reference to the arena in Cantos 11,12, 29, 78, and 80), Pound presents the past as if he has brought it to life with visionary power; the dead appear in the arena at his will. The Roman arena is only one of many metaphors Pound uses to represent his historicism, however; The Cantos are actually the product of several competing methods of historical reconstruction that were added to Pound's early existential historicism over the many years of the poem's composition. We have already seen in Three Cantos

138

CHAPTER 6

that Pound was not completely comfortable with his visions of the past. Unlike that other Arnoldian, Oscar Wilde, who was confident in his ability to "pass into other ages," Pound had his doubts. Even the far more adventurous Yeats, who had taught Pound that the poet is a "mystic courtier who has stolen the keys from the girdle of Time, and can wander where it please him amid the splendours of ancient Courts," entertained doubts about the ability of historical interpretation to render up an untarnished vision of the past. When At the Hawk's Well, the first of Yeats's Noh-style plays, was published in 1917, Yeats included a note in which he cautioned against the attempt to "restore an irrevocable past": Our lyrical and our narrative poetry alike have used their freedom and have approached nearer, as Pater said all the arts would if they were able, to "the condition of music"; and if our modern poetical drama has failed, it is mainly because, always dominated by the example of Shakespeare, it would restore an irrevocable past.9 In the nineteenth installment of "Studies in Contemporary Mentality" (1918) Pound quoted from this note to At the Hawk's Well but transposed Yeats's opinion from the realm of literary to social criticism: . . . Christianity is no longer believed in by a number of enlightened people. Some humane principle, as, for example, the "fraternal deference" of Confucius would, if introduced, finish off Christianity. The German, seeing that Christianity was ready for extinction, took, in his usual blunt-headedness, the wrong end of the stick. He tried to substitute the ethics of the alligator. This is what Mr. Yeats would call attempting to "restore an irrevocable past."10 Pound's sense of his own inability to "restore an irrevocable past" led him to tone down the visionary historical sense of the early Cantos. Like Milton, he insisted that his epic was a "true poem," and he began to doubt if his personal visions of the past were the best route to historical truth. And if Pound was skeptical of his ability to "see the object as it really is," he was not willing to follow Wilde's dictum that

TRUTHANDCALLIOPE

139

the "one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it."11 Canto 5, first published in 1921 but begun several years earlier, dramatizes this tension: Great bulk, huge mass, thesaurus; Ecbatan, the clock ticks and fades out The bride awaiting the god's touch; Ecbatan, City of patterned streets; again the vision: Down in the viae stradae, toga'd the crowd, and arm'd Rushing on populous business, and from parapet looked down and North was Egypt, the celestial Nile, blue deep, cutting low barren land, Old men and camels working the water-wheels; Measureless seas and stars, Iamblichus' light, the souls ascending, Sparks like a partridge covey, Like the "ciocco", brand struck in the game. "Et Omniformis": Air, fire, the pale soft light. Topaz I manage, and three sorts of blue; but on the barb of time. The fire? always, and the vision always, Ear dull, perhaps, with the vision, flitting And fading at will. (5/17) This passage from Canto 5 lies in the tradition of the Romantic crisis ode; it is a lament for the loss of the powers of the imagination (and the echo of the "caverns measureless to man I Down to a sunless sea" of Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" identifies one of its precursor poems). While Canto 5 begins with an apparition similar to those presented in Three Cantos, a vision of a "toga'd" crowd milling about the streets of Ecbatana, the vision now fades as quickly as it comes. The "ciocco" refers to Dante's description in Canto 28 of the Paradiso of the game of striking sparks from a burning log as a method of fortune telling:

140

CHAPTER 6

Then, as on the striking of burning logs [ciocchi] there rise innumerable sparks, wherefrom the foolish are wont to draw auguries, so thence there seemed to rise again more than a thousand lights, and mount, some much, some little, even as the Sun which kindles them allotted them; and when each had rested in its place, I saw the head and the neck of an eagle represented by that patterned fire.12 These sparks reveal true visions in Paradise; on earth their auguries are merely foolish. Mindful of the short-sighted ones who believe in the prophesies of the "ciocchi," Pound concedes that his visions are made "on the barb of time" and that they are "flitting I and fading at will." As Canto 5 progresses, then, Pound gives up his visionary method of recording history and inaugurates the "cut and paste" method of including history in his poem that would be used more extensively in the Malatesta Cantos and brought to its logical conclusion in the Jefferson and Adams Cantos. At the same time he was working on Canto 5, Pound offered a description of this method in response to the "Nestor" chapter of Ulysses in "Pastiche: the Regional" (1919): "History is not a 'dream from which I am trying to awake,' " wrote Pound (misquoting Joyce who wrote "nightmare"). Any historical concept and any sociological deduction from history must assemble a great number of such violently contrasted facts, if it is to be valid. It must not be a simple paradox, or a simple opposition of two terms. Canto 5 continues with an examination of the murder of Alessandro Medici by his brother Lorenzo through this method of "contrasted facts."Juxtaposing several historians' accounts of the murder, Pound attempts to discover whether the act was committed for just or unjust reasons. "Snippets of this kind," he wrote in "Pastiche: the Regional," "build up our concept of wrong, of right, of history."13 Up to this point Pound's goal in Canto 5 is not far from that of "Near Perigord." He began that poem by asking whether Bertran de Born's canzon was motivated by political or amorous designs and concluded that this question could not be answered. In Canto 5 he comes

TRUTHANDCALLIOPE

141

to the same conclusion in a more complicated way. Reviewing the ac­ counts of various historians, he concludes that their error was to de­ cide whether the murder was just or unjust: the very decision "falsi­ fies" the facts. Pound champions Benedetto Varchi (1503-1565) as "one wanting the facts." This historian—like Pound himself in "Near Perigord"—decided that he could not determine the nature of the crime given the facts. In Canto 5 Pound quotes from this passage in Varchi's Storia Fiorentina in which the historian refuses to decide whether the murder was "pia" or "empia": "io non voglio disputare, se quest'atto fu crudele ο pietoso, commendabile ο biasimevole. . . . non so se pia ο empia, ma certo terribile e risoluta deliberazione" [I do not want to debate whether this act was cruel or merciful, com­ mendable or culpable. . . . Whether noble or ignoble I do not know, but certainly a resolute and terrible decision].14 In one of his essays on Remy de Gourmont Pound praised Varchi, saying that the "rela­ tion of two individuals is so complex that no third person can pass judgment upon it. . . . The light of the Renaissance shines in Varchi when he declines to pass judgment on Lorenzaccio" (LE, 355). Pound would canonize this virtue in Canto 13 when he wrote, para­ phrasing Confucius, And even I can remember A day when the historians left blanks in their writings, I mean for things they didn't know. (13/60) Pound himself wants to appear as a historian who leaves blanks and declines to pass judgment in Canto 5. As Wendy Flory has remarked in her study ofThe Cantos as "a record of struggle," Canto 5 presents Pound's transformation "from the inspired poet to the conscientious historian."15 Yet Pound was led astray if he believed that the with­ holding of judgment or the inclusion of blanks "falsifies" the "facts" any less than any other rhetorical strategy for presenting history. Canto 5 gives us the first glimpse of the neopositivist method of con­ catenation of facts that will shape (in different ways) so much of the rest of The Cantos, and it is one of the most crucial and potentially misleading points in the entire poem. It is here that Pound begins to abandon the historicism of/ Gather the Limbs of Osiris. He is now

142

CHAPTER 6

more concerned with the truth-claim of his history than with the per­ sonal act of historical reconstruction. While the Pound of/ Gather the Limbs of Osiris maintained that one could know the past only through personal involvement with it, the Pound of Canto 5 wants to remove his presence from the poem, emphasizing not the act of historical vi­ sion but the "facts" of history "untainted" by the personality of the historian. In the passage that Pound admired in theStoriaFiorentina, Varchi is adamant in his use of the first person: "Io non voglio disputare. . . . non so se pia ο empia." But in Canto 5 the signs of Pound's personal involvement in the past begin to disappear. While Varchi's inclusion of "blanks" in his history was a personal choice, Pound wants to give the impression that the "blanks" in his history are an inevitable result of the "facts." Michael Bernstein has offered the best description of this aspect of The Cantos in general: [Pound] wanted the text to give the impression of the tribe's own heritage narrating itself, of the different historical voices address­ ing us as if without the mediation of one unique narrator or con­ trolling author. It is almost as though the texture ofThe Cantos were designed to illustrate Karl Popper's idea of an "epistemology with­ out a knowing subject," of information objectively existing and available for communal use without necessarily being fully realized 16 in any single individual's competence. The efficacy of Bernstein's argument depends upon the force of the word "impression." Indeed The Cantos offers merely the impression of a history narrating itself, the impression of historical objectivity, the impression of the absence of an omniscient author. Pound's rhetorical strategy was to remove the signs of his personal presence from the poem in order to give the illusion of impersonal objectivity. And whether this strategy is any more conscientious or any less falsifying than any other strategy is highly debatable. Whether or not Pound makes his presence visible, he is present at every moment o(The Can­ tos, shaping a discourse that is a profoundly personal and selective interpretation of history. Pound's removal of the signs of authorial presence from The Cantos is finally a political strategy designed to

TRUTH AND CALLIOPE

143

make his idiosyncratic interpretations of history and economics seem as inevitable as nature itself. Unless we want to excuse Pound's unattractive politics, we cannot accept his fiction that the poem "narrates itself." The history included in The Cantos is not factual or inevitable in any absolute sense; it is one man's interpretation. Like all positivist methodologies, Pound's is predicated on the questionable belief that anything we could call a "fact" exists independently from the interpretive strategy that presents it. T. S. Eliot (whose understanding of the intricacies of historiography surpassed Pound's in these matters) made this point well when he praised Frazer's The Golden Bough as "a statement of fact which is not involved in the maintenance or fall of any theory of the author's" but immediately added that this "absence of speculation is a conscious and deliberate scrupulousness, a positive point of view" that affects our understanding of the "facts" as much as any other.17 To be meaningful, Eliot knew that "facts" need to be placed in the framework of an interpretation—even if that interpretation consists (as it appears to in the Jefferson and Adams Cantos) of the silent ordering of the material. Pound wrote in 1915 that the "first difficulty in a modern poem is to give a feeling of the reality of the speaker, the second, given the reality of the speaker, to gain any degree of poignancy in one's utterance" (SP, 418). The 1917 versions of the first Three Cantos remain true to this idea, but after these early portions of the poem it is not until the Pisan Cantos that Pound once again openly affirms Dilthey's dictum that "the first condition for the possibility of the study of history lies in this: that I myself am an historical being, that the man who studies history is the man who makes history." Eliot's comment about The Golden Bough is particularly useful for pointing out how Pound's apparently impersonal presentation of "contrasted facts" in some of the intervening cantos is a deceptive rhetorical strategy because it was very much in response to Eliot that Pound moved away from his early historicism. We have seen that Eliot helped Pound to revise Three Cantos for their appearance in the American edition oi Lustra. As Ronald Bush has noticed, one of the effects of this revision was that twenty-one personal pronouns were eliminated from Three Cantos I. Pound was already attempting to disguise his presence in the poem

144

CHAPTER 6

and give the illusion that his history was "narrating itself." Yet in a 1918 essay on Pound, Eliot wrote that Three Cantos constitutes "an objective and reticent autobiography."18 Eliot could see (as can anyone who reads through Pound's incidental prose from 1911 through 1917) that Three Cantos was a record of the growth of Pound's mind, a journal of his most pressing obsessions. Whether Pound appeared directly in Three Cantos or not, Eliot knew it was a poem steeped in Pound's personality. Pound and Eliot must have discussed the progress of The Cantos during their 1919 walking tour in southern France. Pound and his wife set out on this trip on 22 April 1919, and Eliot joined them in Excideuil around August 15th.19 Throughout this walking tour, Pound wrote the series of essays titled "Pastiche: the Regional," which he mailed back to England for publication in the New Age. Superficially these essays present an account of the French landscape and people; they are more profitably read as a record of Pound's reading and thoughts during the summer of 1919. His response to Joyce's statement about history in Ulysses (which I have already quoted in connection with Canto 5) appears in the seventh segment of "Pastiche: the Regional." This response becomes even more interesting once we notice that Pound wrote it in France just after Eliot joined him on his walking tour. The two poets must have discussed Joyce's chapter, and Pound surely explained to Eliot his new theory of "contrasted facts" as a means of building up "our concept of wrong, of right, of history." Eliot probably disagreed since he had recently written in his dissertation on Bradley that "facts are not merely found in the world and laid together like bricks, but every fact has in a sense its place prepared for it before it arrives, and without the implication of a system in which it belongs the fact is not a fact at all" (KE, 60). Eliot knew that contrasted facts do not build up our idea of anything unless they are held in some kind of preconceived order. The early Three Cantos or even the contrasted facts of the Malatesta sequence remained from Eliot's point of view an autobiography. Eliot would soon write The Waste Land, his own most autobiographical poem, and when Pound helped edit the manuscript he did what he and Eliot had done to Three Cantos several years before: he

TRUTH AND CALLIOPE

145

tried to remove most of the visible signs of Eliot's personal presence in the poem. Pound queried every use of the first person in "The Burial of the Dead" ("I could not speak," "I look in vain," and "I have sometimes seen and see") though Eliot deleted only the last of these phrases (WLF, 7, 9). The excision of "I have sometimes seen and see" from the first line of this passage gave The Waste Land the quality Pound sought in his own long poem—that of the events "narrating themselves": Unreal City, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many. (CPP, 39) Beside Eliot's repetition of the Unreal City motif in "The Fire Sermon" Pound once again deleted the phrase "I have seen and see" (WLF, 43), and in the Tiresias passage that follows he wrote "Perhaps be damned" beside the line "Perhaps his inclinations touch the stage" (WLF, 45). Pound was no longer interested in the subjective interpretation of events by individual speakers. He wanted certainty, and fallible individuals could not be certain. When Eliot's Tiresias used the word "may" in the line "Across her brain one half-formed thought may pass" Pound erupted in this free-verse tirade in the margin: make up yr. mind you Tiresias if you know know damn well or else you dont. (WLF, 47) The idea of using Tiresias as a narrator appealed to Pound because Tiresias could speak nothing but the truth—the facts. He is the perfect emblem for a poem that grasps for the facts of history. Yet Eliot was not writing that poem (he used Tiresias, we shall see, more as an emblem for the wholeness of poetic vision rather than the truthfulness

146

CHAPTER 6

of history). Pound's Cantos begins with the speech of Tiresias, and it may have been The Waste Land that persuaded him to move Tiresias to the opening of the poem (just as it may have been Three Cantos that persuaded Eliot to place Tiresias at the center of The Waste Land). In The Cantos Tiresias functions as the voice of unquestionable truth; unlike Eliot's Tiresias he knows what he knows "damn well." In Canto 2 (first published in 1922 as Canto 8—after Pound had edited The Waste Land) Pentheus is warned that he had better "listen to Tiresias" (2/9). The voice of certainty had become Pound's highest value, and he did not find it in The Waste Land. Pound tried to edit Eliot's personal presence out of the poem but he did not succeed. Eliot's fragments were not impartially contrasted facts but fragments shored against his ruins.20 In response to The Waste Land, then, Pound began the Malatesta Cantos, first published in Eliot's Criterion in 1923. When he printed the sequence in A Draft of XVI Cantos (1925) he added these lines to the opening of Canto 8, making his poem's relationship to Eliot's explicit: These fragments you have shelved (shored). "Slut!" "Bitch!" Truth and Calliope Slanging each other sous les lauriers: That Alessandro was negroid. And Malatesta Sigismund. (8/28) If Pound's Three Cantos were an autobiography in Eliot's eyes, Pound knew that The Waste Land was an even more profoundly autobiographical poem; it included a great deal of history in its texture, but these "facts" were clearly mediated by a single consciousness. In the Malatesta sequence Pound set out to write the poem Eliot did not, a poem that works as if it were narrated by Tiresias (or no one), a poem that seems to present history unmediated by an authorial presence. If Calliope had won over Truth in The Waste Land, Pound set out to correct the balance in his Malatesta Cantos. The cryptic line "That Alessandro was negroid" is the voice of Truth, telling the reader that the Alessandro we shall meet in the following cantos is Alessandro Sforza, not Alessandro Medici whose murder we examined in Canto 5. In the Malatesta sequence Pound offers few signs of authorial presence. He is evident only (to use the phrase with which he described

TRUTHANDCALLIOPE

147

Varchi in Canto 5) as one "wanting the facts," and these cantos take the method of "contrasted facts" inaugurated in Canto 5 to a more daring conclusion. Pound includes actual historical documents in this part of the poem. Unlike Eliot's quotations in The Waste Land (such as his use of lines from the Inferno to describe the "Unreal City" of modern London), these documents are not absorbed into a portrait of the present world but are presented as evidence that the reader is free to sift and judge in order to verify Pound's portrait of the past. Because of Pound's inclusion of verifiable documents, the MaIatesta sequence has been called the decisive turning point in The Cantos?1 The documents are a new element in the poem, yet it seems to me that the similarities between the Malatesta sequence and the cantos that precede it are of greater importance than the differences. Instead of emphasizing the difference between personal vision and apparently objective fact, the juxtapositional structure of The Cantos tends to level those differences, placing the personal and the mythical side by side with the "factual" document. All of this material appears "in the arena" of Pound's sensibility. He admits as much when in Canto 11 he refers to his position in the arena in the middle of a catalogue of Malatesta's exploits: And the big diamond pawned in Venice, And he gone out into Morea Where they sent him to do in the Mo'ammeds, With 5,000 against 25,000, and he nearly died out in Sparta, Morea, Lakedaemon, and came back with no pep in him And we sit here. I have sat here For forty thousand years, And they trapped him down here in the marsh land, in '46 that was; And the poor devils dying of cold, that was Rocca Sorano. (11/50) When The Cantos are examined in the order in which they were written, we see that this passage is actually the first place in which Pound referred to himself sitting in the arena watching history acted out be-

148

CHAPTER 6

fore him; the reference in Canto 4 was added in 1925. Reading this passage after Canto 4 as we now do, it appears as a sign that Pound's new "factual" method of including history in the poem is unstable, that his personal presence always threatens to appear in the very "blanks" he leaves in the poem.22 The "facts" that Pound presents in order to build up our idea of Malatesta do so precisely because they are preconditioned by Pound's personal notions about the man and his age. Pound inherited this conception of the Renaissance from nineteenth-century historians— Pater, Burckhardt, and Symonds. And although Pound believed that "no student. . . can ever quite rest until he has made his own analysis" of the age (GB, 111), his analysis is predictably colored by the work of his mentors. Neither his conception of the Renaissance as an age marked by the juxtaposition of political horrors and artistic wonders nor his selection of Sigismundo Malatesta as the supreme embodiment of the juxtaposition is particularly novel. While Burckhardt wrote that "unscrupulousness, impiety, military skill, and high culture have been seldom so combined in one individual as in Sigismundo Malatesta," Symonds remarked that Malatesta "might be selected as a true type of the princes who united a romantic zeal for culture with the vices of the barbarians."23 Pound did not survey the facts of Malatesta's career and come to the same conclusion; he came to this conclusion through his reading in nineteenth-century historiography. As he surveyed his documents (most of which were taken from secondary sources)24 he selected the ones he needed to fit this interpretation of the Renaissance. "I suppose one has to 'select,' " Pound admitted to John Quinn of his research. "IfI find [Malatesta] was TOO bloody quiet and orderly it will ruin the canto. Which needs a certain boisterousness and disorder to contrast with his constructive work."25 In Canto 9 when Pound tells us that Malatesta "signed on with Siena; / And that time they grabbed his post-bag," we should not be surprised that the actual letters that Pound lets us read are not about the battlefield but the progress of the Tempio: "As soon as the Xmas fetes are over I will have the stone "floor laid in the sacresty, for which the stone is already cut.

TRUTH AND CALLIOPE

149

"The wall of the building is finished and I shall now get the "roof on. "We have not begun putting new stone into the martyr "chapel; first because the heavy frosts wd. certainly spoil "the job; secondly because the aliofants aren't yet here and "one can't get the measurements for the cornice to the columns "that are to rest on the aliofants. (9/40) Rather than building up our idea of history, these documents express Pound's conventional ideas of the Renaissance and confirm our own.26 The "post-bag" of the Malatesta Cantos is different from the "rag-bag" of Three Cantos in that it contains documents rather than Pound's "visions" of the past; but it is profoundly similar because the contents of both bags are ultimately the contents of Pound's mind. As much as Three Cantos, this portrait of Malatesta is part of an "objective and reticent autobiography." When we look ahead to the 1930s and see that Pound came to believe that Mussolini would "end with Sigismundo [Malatesta] and the men of order" (L, 239), we can also see that the Malatesta sequence is one of the more ominous turning points in the poem that includes the history of Pound's life. According to Dilthey, all history is autobiography and explicit autobiography may be the highest form of history itself: In autobiography we encounter the highest and most instructive form of the understanding of life. Here life is an external phenomenon from which understanding penetrates to what produced it within a particular environment. The person who understands it is the same as the one who created it. . . . [In autobiography] we approach the roots of all historical comprehension. Autobiography is merely the literary expression of a man's reflection on his life. Every individual reflects, more or less, on his life. Such reflection is always present and expresses itself in ever new forms. . . . It alone makes historical insight possible. The power and breadth of our own lives and the energy with which we reflect on them are the foundations of historical vision which enables us to give new life to the bloodless shadows of the past. Com-

150

CHAPTER 6

bined with an infinite desire to surrender to, and lose oneself in, the existence of others, it makes the great historian.27 That is the lesson of Three Cantos, but it is a lesson the Malatesta Cantos serve up only against their will. The historicism of Dilthey, Croce, and Pater grew in opposition to positivistic modes of history writing that stressed the importance of facts rather than interpretations. Pound began as a poet who espoused an existential historicism, believing that history was necessarily the product of one man's interpretation in a particular place and a particular time. By the time he came to write the Malatesta sequence, he was more interested in verifiable facts than in idiosyncratic interpretations. While I have demonstrated that even an apparently objective or impersonal portion of The Cantos is governed by Pound's personal presence, it nevertheless remains true that Pound attempted to write a poem that questioned the centrality of personal emotion to poetry. Despite their dependence on nineteenth-century historiography, the Malatesta Cantos do not fit as easily into a Romantic tradition of poetry as Three Cantos. Pound's portrait of Sigismundo Malatesta proceeds from different assumptions about history from those of Three Cantos or I Gather the Limbs of Osiris. To find the long poem that is the heir of the existential historicism born in the later nineteenth century and then sketched out by Pound in his early essays, we must look not to the later Cantos but to The Waste Land. Unlike the Malatesta sequence, The Waste Land is based upon historical principles similar to those that led Dilthey to state that the first condition for the study of history is that "I myself am an historical being." The 1919 walking tour was the beginning of the end to Pound and Eliot's collaboration. Pound had already begun to move away from his early ideas about history. But Eliot had absorbed those ideas, sifting them together with his more rigorously trained background in philosophy and historiography. From 1909, when Pound first arrived in London, until 1917, when Three Cantos was published, Pound was the mastermind behind literary modernism, amalgamating the best parts of Pater, Yeats, and Joyce, and providing the movement's most articulate expressions of

TRUTH AND CALLIOPE

151

the "historical sense." By 1917 Eliot began to take Pound's place as the primary spokesman for the sense of the past. Pound himself considered The Waste Land to be "the justification of the 'movement,' of our modern experiment, since 1900" (L, 180). And while Pound was talking about the "historical sense" as early as 1910, it was not until Eliot discussed the idea formally in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919) that it became an unquestioned part of the ideology ofliterary modernism. This essay was also written when Eliot returned from his 1919 walking tour with Pound, and it looks backward to Pound's Three Cantos as it looks forward to The Waste Land. In my effort to document the theory and practice of the modernist "historical sense," then, I turn now from The Cantos of Ezra Pound to the work of the young American who, as Pound said of him in 1914, had "actually trained himself and modernized himself on his own" (L, 140). Eliot did have many of his modernized trappings in place when he arrived in London (he had discovered Laforgue's poetry and Corbiere's snappy suits at Harvard), but he learned about the "historical sense" by reading "Near Perigord" and Three Cantos as he wrote his dissertation on the philosophy of F. H. Bradley. To trace the development of the modernist "historical sense" to its fruition in The Waste Land, it is with Eliot's reading of Pound that we must begin.

Chapter

Seven

Eeldrop and Appleplex: Eliot and Pound

Eliot first came to visit Pound in the triangular study of his Kensing­ ton apartment in the Autumn of 1914, and Pound immediately sent "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" to Harriet Monroe, calling it "the best poem I have yet had or seen from an American" (L, 40). At the same time, Eliot wrote to Conrad Aiken that he found Pound's verse "touchingly incompetent."1 This opinion would change. Eliot went up to Oxford, completed his dissertation on the philosophy of F. H. Bradley, married Vivienne Haigh-Wood, suffered, moved back to London, and began working at Lloyds Bank in 1917. During these three years Eliot wrote little or no verse and published only a few scat­ tered essays in the International Journal ofEthics and the New States­ man. Meanwhile, Pound had remained in close contact with Yeats, Joyce, and Lewis, struggling to promote what was left of his "modern movement" in wartime. It was only when Eliot returned to London that he and Pound began to work closely together. Pound installed him as literary editor of the Egoist when Richard Aldington went off to the war, and Eliot began the prolific outpouring of essays that would culminate in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919) and the high-toned essays on "Ben Jonson" (1919) and "Andrew Marveil" (1921) published in the Times Literary Suppkment. In 1917, after Pound had secured Eliot a place at the Egoist, he found himself a position as foreign editor οϊ the. Little Review. For his first issue (May 1917) he decided that he and Eliot should each submit a piece of prose fiction. Pound wrote "Jodindranath Mawhwor's Oc­ cupation," a brief character sketch that was probably inspired by Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali poet that he and Yeats had "boomed" during 1913. "The soul of Jodindranath Mawhwor," began Pound, "clove to the god of this universe and he meditated the law of the Shastras" (PD, 79). Eliot's far more interesting contribution was "Eeldrop and Appleplex," a ratherfin-de-siecL· imaginary portrait of

ELIOTANDPOUND

153

two terminally sophisticated intellectuals that probably began as an imitation of Bouvard et Pecuchet. Not until the end of "Eeldrop and Appleplex" do the true identities of these intellectuals become clear: taking Appleplex into his confidence, Eeldrop whispers, "I am, I confess to you, in private life, a bank-clerk."2 "Eeldrop and Appleplex" is indeed a satiric portrait of Eliot and Pound, and although this strange experiment in autobiography does not reveal much about Eliot's private life, it reveals a great deal about Eliot's perception of Pound. "Eeldrop and Appleplex" is one of a half-dozen examinations of Pound's works that Eliot published between 1917 and 1919.3 If Eliot first thought of Pound's work as "touchingly incompetent," by 1919 Pound had become the only living poet capable of fulfilling the rigorous requirements of "Tradition and the Individual Talent." "Eeldrop and Appleplex rented two small rooms in a disreputable part of town," began Eliot; "they sometimes slept, more often they talked, or looked out of the window." Whenever "a malefactor was apprehended" in the street in front of the police station, Eeldrop and Appleplex would break off their discourse, and rush out to mingle with the mob. Each pursued his own line of inquiry. Appleplex [Pound], who had the gift of an extraordinary address with the lower classes of both sexes, questioned the onlookers, and usually extracted full and inconsistent histories: Eeldrop [Eliot] preserved a more passive demeanor, listened to the conversation of the people among themselves, registered in his mind their oaths, their redundance of phrase, their various manners of spitting, and the cries of the victim from the hall of justice within. When the crowd dispersed, Eeldrop and Appleplex returned to their rooms: Appleplex entered the results of his inquiries into large note-books, filed according to the nature of the case, from A (adultery) to Y (yeggmen). Eeldrop smoked reflectively. It may be added that Eeldrop was a sceptic, with a taste for mysticism, and Appleplex a materialist with a leaning toward scepticism; that Eeldrop was learned in theology, and that Appleplex studied the physical and biological sciences.4

154

CHAPTER 7

Eliot's self-characterization could not be better fitted: "a sceptic, with a taste for mysticism," "learned in theology." Having completed his extensive study of mystical literature in 1914, he had recently reviewed Brocks's The Ultimate Belief , Rashdall's Conscience and Christ, Merz's Religion and Science, and he was reading Mercier's Manual ofModern Scholastic Phihsophy for iheInternational Journal ojrEthics.5 His characterization of Pound as a "materialist with a leaning toward scepticism" seems a bit one-sided; Pound had probably not told him about the winters he spent at Stone Cottage reading occult romances with Yeats. Despite their differences, however, Eliot goes on to say that Eeldrop and Appleplex shared a "common motive": to separate themselves from time to time, from the fields of their daily employments and their ordinarily social activities. Both were endeavoring to escape not the commonplace, respectable or even the domestic, but the too well pigeon-holed, too taken-for-granted, too highly systematized areas, and—in the language of those whom they sought to avoid—they wished "to apprehend the human soul in its concrete individuality."6 These sentences shed yet another interesting light on Eliot's state of mind during the anxious years of his first marriage, but even more interestingly, they reveal the aspects of Pound's work that Eliot had come to admire and would continue to explore in his subsequent appreciations of Pound's poetry: both poets wanted to "apprehend the soul in its concrete reality," untainted by the structures of everyday life. Eeldrop and Appleplex focused their efforts on the soul of a "fat Spaniard" with whom they dined. This Spaniard was in fact Jose Maria de Elizondo, a priest Pound had met in Madrid in 1906 and again with Eliot in 1917. He appears in the nostalgic reminiscences of the Pisan Cantos: Zeus lies in Ceres' bosom Taishan is attended of loves under Cythera, before sunrise and he said, "Hay aqui mucho catolicismo—(sounded catoliiAismo)

ELIOTANDPOUND

155

y muy poco reliHion" and he said: "Yo creo que Ios reyes desaparecen" (Kings will, I think, disappear) That was Padre Jose Elizondo in 1906 and in 1917 or about 1917. (81/517) Elizondo told Pound that there is "a lot of Catholicism here, but not much religion"; the institutionalization of belief had made true faith impossible. In "Eeldrop and Appleplex" Eliot laments the same institutions that prevent the apprehension of the soul in its concrete reality. But looking at Elizondo (referred to only as the "fat Spaniard"), Eeldrop and Appleplex were able to detach him from his classification and regard him for a moment as a unique being, a soul, however insignificant, with a history of its own, once for all. It is these moments, which we prize, and which alone are revealing. For any vital truth is incapable of being applied to another case: the essential is unique.7 This interest in "moments" of insight that reveal "a vital truth [that] is incapable of being applied to another case" recalls Pound's abiding interest in virtu: "In each soul," Pound wrote in I Gather the Limbs of Osiris, "there is some one element which predominates, which is in some particular and intense way the quality or virtu of the individual; in no two souls is this the same." Like Pound, Eliot was intent upon divining the virtu, the essence, of any object in the world—a deeper reality, divorced from the confining structures of our daily lives. Both poets forged a poetics with a pedigree that leads back to Pater, the hinge on which the modern and the Romantic turn. Like Pater and Pound, Eliot became not so interested in isolating the virtu of a fat Spaniard across the table as in divining the virtu of the long-dead artists of the past. Before 1917, Eliot's poetry and criticism reveal a scanty interest in history. The poems collected in Prufrock and Other Observations contain passing allusions to Eliot's favorite predecessors (Shakespeare, Dante), but it was not until he began to compose the quatrain poems collected in Poems 1920 that an overpowering "historical sense" became the structural principle of his

CHAPTER 7

156

verse. Likewise, the criticism Eliot wrote before 1918 may be summed up by the titles of two series of essays he published in the Egoist: "Reflections on Contemporary Poetry" and "Studies in Contemporary Criticism." But in 1918 Eliot began to discuss his theory of the "historical sense" in his criticism, and he began to publish his now wellknown essays on Jonson, Marlowe, Massinger, Marvell, Dante, and Hamlet. These essays—not those on Amy Lowell, Edgar Lee Masters, Harold Monro, and Herbert Read—were collected in TheSacred Wood. Two events conspired to make this transformation in Eliot's critical and poetic personality possible. The first was the series of extension lectures on Elizabethan literature that he gave during the academic year 1918—1919; the second was the intensive reading of Pound's early "poems including history," "Near Perigord" and Three Cantos, which Eliot undertook during these same years.8 His first examination of Pound's verse came in "Reflections on vers libre," published in the New Statesman in 1917. In illustration of his thesis that vers libre does not exist, Eliot quotes this stanza, commenting that "the charm of these lines could not be, without the constant suggestion and the skillful evasion of iambic pentameter" (TCC, 186): There shut up in his castle, Tairiran's, She who had nor ears nor tongue save in her hands, Gone—ah, gone—untouched, unreachable! She who could never live save through one person, She who could never speak save to one person, And all the rest of her a shifting change, A broken bundle of mirrors . . . ! (P, 157) Although Eliot does not provide the author's name, these are of course the final lines of Pound's "Near Perigord." Eliot had no more to say about this stanza and nothing to say about Pound himself in "Reflections on vers libre," but it is nevertheless clear that Eliot was fascinated by "Near Perigord." In his next discussion of Pound's work, "Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry" (published anonymously early in 1918 although dated 1917), Eliot quotes these lines from "Near Perigord" again as an example of one of the supreme achievements of Pound's work (TCC, 179-180). Interested as Eliot was in what Pound

ELIOTANDPOUND

157

would have called virtu, "Near Perigord" was a decisive text for him. As I have suggested, the poem is about the intricacies of the quest for historical knowledge, and the final lines that Eliot quotes remain one of Pound's most subtle expressions of the kind of knowledge that can be acquired by a fine-tuned historical sense. Eliot did not make the reasons for his infatuation with the final lines of "Near Perigord" explicit until he referred to them yet again in his next appreciation of Pound's work, "A Note on Ezra Pound" (1918): The ways in which a poet may bring the past to bear upon the present can differ very widely. . . . "Near Perigord" expresses a situation of a man and a woman; it is also an appreciation of a particular time with much historical and geographical knowledge, and incidentally contains a beautiful translation of half a dozen lines of Dante . . . and the elements are perfectly fused. The last part of the poem is as modern as Henry James. The intensity of the appreciative element, appreciation of particular places and times, of particular lines and words, the intensity carries the appreciation over and adds to the effect, by what in any other poet would only be literary criticism. The final lines of "Near Perigord" are "as modern as Henry James" and at the same time a criticism of a particular time and place in the past. This fusion of past and present, the palimpsest-like quality of Pound's poetry, is what attracted Eliot most: "My point is to be this," Eliot concluded, "that Pound's erudition, his interest in the past, and his interest in the present are one." 9 Pound's interest in Provence was not merely "archaeology"; he had what Eliot would soon call a "creative interest" in the past. In response to Pound's work Eliot began to formulate the program for poetry he would outline in "Tradition and the Individual Talent." His claim that Pound's interest in the past and the present are fused became his more general assertion that a poet must perceive both the "pastness" and the "presence" of the past and perceive them as one. In "Tradition and the Individual Talent" Eliot dubs this faculty the "historical sense." While Pound had been talking about his "histori-

158

CHAPTER 7

cal sense" (as opposed to his "sense of history") for several years, Eliot's first use of the term appears in his essay on "The Hawthorne Aspect" of Henry James (1918); his first explanation of the term occurs one month later in "A Note on Ezra Pound," after he praises "Near Perigord" for being "as modern as Henry James." For Eliot, as for Pater and Wilde, one must be immersed in the past to be truly "modern." While Wilde wrote that the historical sense "is the imagination; and the imagination is simply concentrated race-experience," Eliot maintained that a large part of any poet's "inspiration" must come from reading and from his knowledge of history. I mean history widely taken; any cultivation of the historical sense, of perception of our position relative to the past, and in particular of the poet's relation to poets of the past. Mr. Pound's extensive knowledge of literature is one important thing, his particular passion for and minute knowledge of Provengal is another. What has mattered is not simply that he has by insight and labour got the spirit of Provengal, or of Chinese, or of Anglo-Saxon, as the case may be; but that he has made masterpieces, some of translation, some of recreation, by his perception of the relation of these periods and languages to the present, of what they have that we want; and this perception of relation involves an organized view of the whole course of European poetry from Homer. He has also—I shall come to that presently—a particular gift of his own of calling the past to life.10 Like Pound himself, as I have said, Eliot separates the "sense of history" (the ability to recreate a specific moment in the past) from the "historical sense" that enables him to perceive one moment in the past in relation to other moments in the past and with the present. Although Eliot found precedents for his historicism in a wide range of philosophers and historians, Pound's poetry showed him the way to incorporate his historical interests into his own poems. While Eliot was writing articles on Pound's work, he was collecting the fragments that would become The Waste Land. It is significant, I think, that Eliot responded positively to the poetry Pound wrote beginning with "Near Perigord." Much of the verse

ELIOTANDPOUND

159

Pound wrote prior to 1915 was "touchingly incompetent" by comparison. While I have been able to discover the workings of Pound's historical sense in the early poems ofCanzoni, it is probably because I necessarily view those poems from the perspective of Pound's later work; unless his early readers were well acquainted with Pound and his prose writings of 1910 to 1915, they would have had more difficulty. In the same way, Eliot did not understand the importance of Pound's interest in history until he read "Near Perigord" and Three Cantos. In his next appreciation of these poems, "The Method of Mr. Pound" (actually a review of Quia Pauper Amavi [1919]), Eliot could see the evidence of Pound's historical sense in his earliest poetry: From the earlier verse it might have seemed that Mr. Pound inclined to bury himself and his readers in the taste orfriandise of a particular past. The "Seafarer" was evidence of a much more extensive historical sense, the extent of which implied that the point, the only possible point, upon which such various historical interests could converge was the present.11 Looking back over the entire corpus of Pound's work in 1919, Eliot saw that Pound's use of the "historical sense" began with "The Seafarer," the first installment in Pound's earliest articulation of his historical principles, I Gather the Limbs of Osiris. And his interpretation of the poem is consonant with Pound's early ideals: "The Seafarer" is not an exercise in archaeology but an attempt to reveal the relevance of the ancient past in the present. Quia Pauper Amavi, the book Pound published in 1919 and Eliot reviewed in "The Method of Mr. Pound," contains four linked sequences, "Langue d'Oc" and "Moeurs Contemporaines," the original versions of the first three cantos, and "Homage to Sextus Propertius." As Eliot recognized, the importance of the book lay in its "whole design."12 By bringing together these four sequences, Pound sought to create a more expansive expression of his "historical sense" than would be possible within any single poem; connections between various points in the past are to be found not simply within one poem but between the sequences. In Quia Pauper Amavi the four sequences are

160

CHAPTER 7

meant to be read "simultaneously"; the book reveals Pound's first extensive use of what we have come to call "spatial form."13 Eliot's comments about the versions oiThree Cantos in Quia Pauper Amavi provide a particularly illuminating commentary on his own work. Not until Eliot read these cantos did he begin writing poems such as "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar," "Gerontion," and ultimately The Waste Land—poems that reveal an "historical sense" similar to that of Pound's early poetry. Eliot knew Three Cantos well; as we have seen, he had helped Pound revise the poem for its second appearance in the American edition of Lustra even before it was first published in Poetry magazine. When Eliot read these Cantos again in Quia Pauper Amavi he noted that they were unfinished and tentative, but he insisted that they showed "what the consummation of Mr. Pound's work could be: a final fusion of all his masks, a final concentration of the entire past upon the present."14 When Eliot made this statement he had read Three Cantos and Canto 4 (privately printed in October 1919); he had probably seen drafts of Cantos 5 through 7 (first published in 1921). It must be emphasized that he did not make this statement about the Malatesta sequence (which would not appear until after The Waste Land was published). We have seen that Pound's historicism changed radically soon after the first several cantos appeared and that The Waste Land had something to do with that change. In 1922 Pound wrote to Quinn that The Waste Land was enough "to make the rest of us shut up shop. I haven't done so; have in fact knocked out another Canto (not in the least a la Eliot, or connected with 'modern life')."15 Pound was referring to the poem that would eventually become Canto 2, and it is important to note that his description of this new canto is at odds with Eliot's characterization of Three Cantos. While Pound had begun to write poetry that was not "connected with 'modern life,' " Eliot had praised Three Cantos for their "concentration of the entire past upon the present." This phrase would not necessarily apply to the later Cantos. But there could be no better description of The Waste Land. Not only was Eliot influenced primarily by the Pound of Three Cantos, but he read these poems in a slightly different way from Pound himself. All of Eliot's writings about Pound revolve around the huge expanse

ELIOTANDPOUND

161

of historical knowledge Eliot found in his poetry. Pound has "an organized view of the whole course of European poetry from Homer." Pound "proceeds by acquiring the entire past." The Cantos will reveal "a final concentration of the entire past upon the present." To say the least, these are extravagant claims, but they point out an important aspect of Eliot's conception of the "historical sense" that differs from Pound's. In stressing the importance of Pound's work for the development of Eliot's interest in history, I do not mean to suggest that Pound was the only source of Eliot's preoccupation. Pound's early poetry did provide Eliot with examples of ways in which he could include history in his own poems, but Pound never stressed the importance of a complete knowledge of the "entire" past or the need to show evidence of the "entire" past in a single book or poem. This emphasis is more a result of the years Eliot spent studying philosophy prior to his close association with Pound. Throughout his writings on Pound, Eliot was applying principles concerning the nature of historical understanding that he had learned from F. H. Bradley, the British philosopher who was the subject of his doctoral dissertation. Eliot's association of Pound and Bradley was not completely fortuitous or arbitrary. The roots of Pound's historical sense, as we have seen, lie in the existential historicism of Pater and Burckhardt and fit comfortably in a matrix of historical thought defined by Nietzsche, Dilthey, and Croce. Bradley's first book was The Presuppositions of Critical History (1874), published in the same year as Nietzsche's The Use and Abuse of History and the year after Pater's The Renaissance. R. G. Collingwood has remarked that Bradley's work initiated the "Copernican revolution" in historical thought, and no doubt for the English historian it did (though it was not until well into the twentieth century that the importance of Bradley's work began to be recognized).16 But Bradley's The Presuppositions of Critical History can be seen as a part of a larger intellectual movement. Like the work of Dilthey and Croce, Bradley's essay reveals an existential historicism that developed in response to nineteenth-century positivism. It is another example of what Stuart Hughes has described as the displacement of "the axis of social thought from the apparent and objectively verifiable to the only partially conscious area of unexplained motivation."17 Like Dilthey

CHAPTER 7

162

and Croce, Bradley was acutely aware of the interpreter's own historicity, and he found the model for historical inquiry not in the work of the scientist but in the poet: It should not be forgotten that, if the interest of history is not the enlargement of the territory of science, but rather the exhibition of the oneness of humanity in all its stages and under all its varieties; if it is ourselves that we seek in the perished (and is there anything else which we can seek?)—if the object of our endeavour is to breathe the life of the present into the death of the past, and re-collect into this pantheon of mind the temporal existences which once seemed mortal, then, where we encounter an alien element, which we cannot recognize as akin to ourselves, that interest fails, the hope and the purpose which inspired us dies, and the endeavour is thwarted. The remembrance of our childhood and our youth is the sweetest of pleasures, for it gives us the feeling of ourselves, as the self of ourself and yet as another; and the failure to recognize or the impossibility of interest in our earlier life, is, to those whom it has befallen, the bitterest pain of the most cruel estrangement.18 In just this brief passage, we can already observe how similar Bradley's historicism is to Dilthey's or Pater's: the rejection of science, the conception of history as an interwoven whole, the emphasis of life in the present, the need to breathe that life into the past—all these tenets of existential historicism are central to Bradley's thought. Another aspect of this passage reveals the peculiarly English quality of Bradley's thought: like Pater, Bradley found the initial inspiration for his historicism in Wordsworth. His sense that the "remembrance of our childhood and our youth is the sweetest of pleasures" and that the loss of those memories provokes "the bitterest pain of the most cruel estrangement" recalls the experience that is the motivating force behind Wordsworth's poetry: in "Tintern Abbey" Wordsworth is haunted by the fear of the loss of his ability to recall his past: I cannot paint What then I was. The sounding cataract Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,

ELIOTANDPOUND

163

The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, Their colours and their forms, were then to me An appetite; a feeling and a love, That had no need of a remoter charm, By thought supplied, nor any interest Unborrowed from the eye.—That time is past, And all its aching joys are now no more, And all its dizzy raptures.19 Just as Pater functions as the link between Pound's modernism and Wordsworth's romanticism, Bradley carried Wordsworth's obsession with the powers of memory into Eliot's work. In both Bradley and Eliot, this obsession with memory is transformed into a preoccupation with history, but as Eliot points out in his dissertation on Bradley, an investigation of the nature of personal memory involves the same issues as an investigation of historical knowledge: for Eliot as for Bradley and Dilthey, knowledge of the past is necessarily derived by an individual person in a specific place and time. Eliot saw this kind of historicism in the poetry of Ezra Pound, but to understand the ways in which Eliot included history in his own poems, we must turn from his reading of Pound to a closer look at his reading of Bradley.

Chapter Eight

F. H. Bradley and the "System" of History

For several years before he met Pound, Eliot was engaged in a rigorous philosophical examination of the nature of interpretation. Pound confronted many of the same issues in his attempts to include history in his poems, but Eliot was a trained philosopher, and he addressed these same issues more strenuously in his writings on Bradley. While he was a graduate student in the philosophy department at Harvard in 1913-1914, Eliot took Josiah Royce's seminar in the Comparative Study of Various Types of Scientific Method. According to Harry Todd Costello, a participant in the seminar who was assigned the task of recording its proceedings, Eliot "wanted to know what is 'interpretation' as opposed to 'description'? His year's work circled around this question of the truth of interpretations."1 In fact, Eliot's poetry and criticism would circle around this question throughout his entire career. He came to realize that it is not possible to distinguish between "description" and "interpretation," and the terms in which he asked his question are relevant to one of the most debated topics in literary criticism today, given our awareness of the ways each new interpretation alters the shape of literary history, how can we assert the primacy of one interpretation of our literary past over another? Eliot found one answer to this question by the time he wrote "Tradition and the Individual Talent" and "The Function of Criticism," the essays highlighted in Sehcted Essays and canonized by the New Critics. We still tend to read Eliot through the work of his followers, and consequently we tend to treat him as if he too were a believer in the affective fallacy, or worse, a realist of the most naive kind.2 But Eliot recognized, as we all do, that an interpretation potentially tells us more about the subjective or historical horizons of the reader than about the text itself. And the conflict that he felt between his awareness of the relativity of all knowledge and his desire to formulate ten-

BRADLEY AND THE "SYSTEM" OF HISTORY

165

able criteria for absolute values is the motivating impulse behind all his work. His championing of formalism in his criticism and his preference for the dramatic monologue in his poetry developed not in ignorance of the study of interpretation but in direct response to it. In the introduction to his mother's dramatic poem, SavonaroL· (1926), Eliot declares his belief in the historicity of all interpretation: "Every period of history is seen differently by every other period; the past is in perpetual flux, although only the past can be known." As he goes on to explain this statement, Eliot summarizes his first extended discussion of interpretation, "The Interpretation of Primitive Ritual," a paper presented to Josiah Royce's graduate seminar in 1913: The role played by interpretation has often been neglected in the theory of knowledge. Even Kant, devoting a lifetime to the pursuit of categories, fixed only those which he believed, rightly or wrongly, to be permanent, and overlooked or neglected the fact that these are only the more stable of a vast system of categories in perpetual change. Some years ago, in a paper on The Interpretation of Primitive Ritual, I made a humble attempt to show that in many cases no interpretation of a rite could explain its origin. For the meaning of the series of acts is to the performers themselves an interpretation; the same ritual remaining practically unchanged may assume different meanings for different generations of performers; and the rite may even have originated before "meaning" meant anything at all.3 Like Dilthey, who wanted to complement Kant's The Critique ofPure Reason with a "critique of historical reason" that would describe the categories of historical knowledge, Eliot felt that Kant had accomplished only half the task. For Eliot, all knowledge is relative, and "meaning" is necessarily the function of an interpretive strategy. Anything we assert as permanent or absolute is "only the more stable of a vast system of categories in perpetual change." But Eliot's use of the word "system" points to the way he was able to assert the validity of absolute values within a world of perpetual change. From the time he began as a student of philosophy until the time he became a sage of literary criticism, he believed that since all interpretation is relative to

166

CHAPTER 8

its own system, then the critic with the most whok and ordered system can assay interpretations that approach the absolute. The "systematic" nature of truth is a keystone to Bradley's work, and although he is better known for his studies in logic and metaphysics, Bradley began his career, as we have seen, as a philosopher of history. In his first published work, The Presuppositions of Critical History, he asserts that history is not a science, and that "the object of our endeavour is to breathe the life of the present into the death of the past." Consequently, "there is no such thing as a history without a prejudication" and "the past varies with the present, and can never do otherwise, since it is always the present upon which it rests." Bradley did not want this relativism to render historical knowledge impossible; the "real distinction" is not between prejudiced history and history free of prejudication, but between the writer who has his prejudications without knowing what they are, and whose prejudications, it may be, are false, and the writer who consciously orders and creates from the known foundation of that which for him is truth.4 Bradley calls this foundation a "system"—an ordered whole of which any single assertion is necessarily a part and against which the truthclaim of any assertion must be measured. Bradley believed that all experience is originally a unified whole; our individual intellects abstract a fragmented, limited experience from that whole. In the mind of the "uncritical" historian, all of his experiences continue to exist in "a confused and unsystematized world of consciousness." The mind of the "critical" historian continually reorganizes his world into a new whole, a "system": [This] new object, which now for the critical mind is the sole and increasing reality, is the re-organization of the old world; it is true only because recreated, and can be recreated only because connected into a rational system. Every part must live, and live in the life of the whole.5 Here Bradley's emphasis on wholeness and life points out an important aspect of his conception of "system." The "system," as both

BRADLEY AND THE "SYSTEM" OF HISTORY

167

Bradley and Eliot understand it, is not systematic in the way we normally think of the term (and it would be wrong to think of Eliot as a "systematic" critic); it is not an imposed order, but an order that arises from the immediacy of experience. The word is closer in meaning to the French systeme, a unity that mingles the emotional, intellectual, and sensual aspects of the individual. It is closer to what Bradley means by "immediate experience," a whole that mingles the observer with the observed. It is what Eliot means by a "unified sensibility" or a "point of view."6 After he wrote The Presuppositions of Critical History Bradley did not explicitly address the problem of historical knowledge, but his conception of reality as nothing more than appearances is a radically historical point of view, and his conception of the "system" remained central to his work.7 In one of his later essays, "On Truth and Coherence" (1909), Bradley emphasized that "in the case of facts of perception and memory the test which we do apply and which we must apply, is that of system." "Facts" are justified because and as far as, while taking them as real, I am better able to deal with the incoming new "facts" and in general to make my world wider and more harmonious. The higher and wider my structure, and the more that any particular fact or set of facts is implied in that structure, the more certain are the structure and the facts. And, if we could reach an all-embracing ordered whole, then our certainty would be absolute. But since we cannot do this, we have to remain content with relative probability.8 For Bradley, no judgment has its meaning alone; every single fact is necessarily part of a larger structure. Because our knowledge of the whole of experience is limited, our "facts" are necessarily imperfect interpretations. The larger and more coherent our "system" the more valid our interpretations will be. This conception of history as a "system" is central to the work of many twentieth-century historians. Of the numerous meanings of the word "history," the existential historian rejects the one that is perhaps the most common: a sequence of events presumed to have occurred in the past. "History, then," writes Collingwood, "is not, as it has so

168

CHAPTER 8

often been mis-described, a story of successive events or an account of change. Unlike the natural scientist, the historian is not concerned with events as such at all. He is only concerned with those events which are the outward expression of thoughts, and is only concerned with these in so far as they express thoughts." For Collingwood, who built his historicism from Dilthey, Bradley, and Croce, history arises from the act of thinking about the past: it is "a living past, kept alive by the act of historical thinking itself," and "historical change from one way of thinking to another is not the death of the first, but its survival integrated in a new context."9 For the existential historian, history is not conceived on the model of a linear or cyclical pattern of events, but a palimpsest in which the present is actually made up of remnants of the entire past. For Collingwood, all history survives in the new context of the present. Ortega y Gasset, who considered Dilthey "the most important thinker in the second half of the nineteenth century," described history explicitly as a "system"—not a rational, imposed system such as Hegel's, but an interconnected network in which the whole of the past informs the present: That past is past not because it happened to others but because it forms part of our present, of what we are in the form of having been, because, in short, it is our past. Life as a reality is absolute presence: we cannot say that there is anything unless it is present, of this moment. If then, there is a past, it must be as something present, something active in us now.10 This is the assumption embodied in Pater's La Gioconda; it underlies Croce's assertion that "every true history is contemporary history" and Eliot's claim that "the whole of literature of Europe from Homer . . . has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order" (SW, 49). For Eliot, the poetry of the present is a "system" composed of the "whole of all poetry that has ever been written." All the poetry of the past composes a simultaneous order because it exists only in the present for us—we necessarily understand it from the perspective of our present concerns. Although the conception of history as a "system" is found in the

BRADLEY AND THE "SYSTEM" OF HISTORY

169

work of many philosophers of history, Eliot would naturally have been most familiar with the idea in Bradley's work. And by the time Eliot wrote "The Interpretation of Primitive Ritual" for his graduate seminar in 1913, he had already absorbed Bradley's idea of the "systematic" nature of truth.11 In his paper, Eliot objects to the positivism latent in modern anthropological method and maintains that the socalled "facts" of history are inseparable from the point of view or system of an interpretive strategy. Echoing Bradley's thoughts about the relationship of a "fact" and a "system," Eliot writes that "a fact is a point of attention which has only one aspect or [exists] under a certain definite aspect which places it in a system." He goes on to criticize anthropologists for assuming that they can penetrate the accumulated layers of historical interpretation and discover the original meaning, the "fact" of a primitive ritual: What seemed to one generation fact is, from the point of view of the next, a rejected interpretation. And an interpretation, as such, is neither true nor false; but truth and falsity are relative to a level of interpretation.12 Truth, for Eliot, is determined not by a statement's correspondence to an object of reality, but by its position relative to other statements in a "system" of interpretation. In the discussion that followed Eliot's paper, Josiah Royce suggested that "an interpretation could, in everyday life, be tested by asking questions until mutual understanding was attained." Eliot, according to Harry Todd Costello, said that "no interpretation helps another. Interpretation adds to and thus falsifies the facts, and presents a new problem to disentangle. Interpretation is the other fellow's description."13 This response to Royce's suggestion helps to show the rigorously skeptical nature of Eliot's thought during these early years of his career; the polished doctrine of "Tradition and the Individual Talent" grew in response to his fierce questioning of our ability to know anything certain about the past. In 1913, the same year in which Eliot enrolled in Royce's seminar, Royce published The Problem of Christianity. Like Eliot, Royce was preoccupied with the nature of interpretation, and the second volume of his work is devoted to a dis-

170

CHAPTER 8

cussion of what he calls the "Community of Interpretation." Building from Charles Sanders Peirce's triadic conception of signification, Royce explains how the process of interpretation inevitably builds relationships between interpreters: Psychologically speaking, the mental process [of interpretation] which thus involves three members differs from perception and conception in three respects. First, interpretation is a conversation, and not a lonely enterprise. There is some one, in the realm of psychological happenings, who addresses some one. The one who addresses interprets some object to the one addressed. In the second place, the interpreted object is itself something which has the nature of a mental expression. Peirce uses the term "sign" to name this mental object which is interpreted. Thirdly, since the interpretation is a mental act, and is an act which is expressed, the interpretation itself is, in its turn, a Sign. This new sign calls for further interpretation. For the interpretation is addressed to somebody. And so,—at least in ideal,—the social process involved is endless.14 This endless social process of interpretation builds up communities and determines what may be called "truth" within those communities. What is considered true or real is consequently a collective idea that is determined over time. The "real," wrote Peirce, is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of me and you. Thus, the very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a COMMUNITY, without definite limits, and capable of a definite increase of knowledge. And so those two series of cognition—the real and the unreal—consist of those which, at a time sufficiently future, the community will always continue to reaffirm; and of those which, under the same conditions, will ever after be denied.15 For Peirce, the real is that which the community of interpreters agree upon and affirm as real. Royce borrows this conception of the community, but he places greater emphasis on its historical dimension. He agrees with Peirce that "the world is the Community of Interpre-

BRADLEY AND THE "SYSTEM" OF HISTORY

171

tation," but he stresses that the ideal community may be found only by "an infinite sequence of acts of interpretation. . . . The history of the universe, the whole order of time, is [thus] the history and the order and the expression of this Universal Community."16 It was with this ideal of a "Universal Community" in mind that Royce suggested to Eliot that interpretations could be tested against one another until the group of interpreters agreed upon a "mutual understanding." Eliot's response that "no interpretation helps another" reveals how unwilling he was at this point in his career to find solace in an explanation for the continuity between individual minds that leapt past the limitations of human knowledge too quickly. Yet Eliot was equally as unwilling to leave the human being trapped in the prison of consciousness. Royce's community of interpretation was attractive because it made historical knowledge possible; but it also made that knowledge come too easily—it was, as Royce admitted, an ideal. Unlike Royce, Eliot would stress the difficulty of coming to anything we could call a "mutual understanding." For him, the meeting of individual minds, each locked in what Bradley calls its "finite center," is a process both painful and inexplicable. As we will see in our discussion of The Waste Land, Eliot's ideal of shared knowledge and experience depends upon a mystical interpenetration of minds rather than a rational comparison of interpretations. In his Ph.D. dissertation, originally titled Experience and the Objects ofKnowledge in the Philosophy ofF. H. Bradley (1916), Eliot addresses precisely this issue: locked in an individual point of view or "finite center," what kinds of truth-claims can we make for our interpretations of either the past or the world outside us? Eliot reformulates the Bradleyan definition of "fact" that he had offered in "The Interpretation of Primitive Ritual": Facts are not merely found in the world and laid together like bricks, but every fact has in a sense its place prepared for it before it arrives, and without the implication of a system in which it belongs the fact is not a fact at all. (KE, 60) Without the comprehensive whole of a "system," a "fact" cannot exist. Eliot states definitively that "any assertion about the world, or any

172

CHAPTER 8

ultimate statement about any object in the world, will inevitably be an interpretation" (KE, 165). An interpretation necessarily falsifies what we would like to think of as the objective world, and the more valid interpretation is the product of a more coherent "system": ideas about the past and future do not qualify a real past and future, for there is no real past or future for them to qualify; past and future are such themselves ideal constructions. Ideas of the past are true, not by correspondence with a real past, but by their coherence with each other and ultimately with the present moment; an idea of the past is true, we have found, by virtue of relations among ideas. (KE, 54; my emphasis) Since our interpretations of the past are part of our system of interpretation, and since the truth of our interpretations is determined by their relations with other aspects of our system, then the most coherent system will be the most truthful. "And of course the only real truth is the whole truth" (KE, 163), writes Eliot. In our search for truth, we must constantly work to transcend our limited points of view for an ordered vision of wholeness: For the life of a soul does not consist in the contemplation of one consistent world but in the painful task of unifying (to a greater or less extent) jarring and incompatible ones, and passing, when possible, from two or more discordant viewpoints to a higher which shall somehow include and transmute them. (KE, 147-148) The word "somehow" carries a great deal of weight here, but Eliot relies on its vagueness—as does Bradley17—to emphasize the fact that transcendence is not rationally explainable. Like Bradley, Eliot believes that if we can "somehow" expand our point of view into a "system" wide and coherent enough to encompass the whole truth, then our interpretations would be absolutely true.18 Throughout his career, Eliot returned to the theories of interpretation he developed in "The Interpretation of Primitive Ritual" and Knowledge and Experience. The "historical sense" of "Tradition and the Individual Talent," with its emphasis on wholeness and order, grew from these early concerns. The poet "can neither take the past

BRADLEY AND THE "SYSTEM" OF HISTORY

173

as a lump, an indiscriminate bolus, nor can he form himself wholly on one or two private admirations." The poet must be what Bradley calls a "critical historian" and understand history as a "system": The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. (SW, 49; my emphasis) In the same way that a "fact" cannot exist except as part of a "system," Eliot writes that "no poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. . . .You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead" (SW, 49). Eliot's tradition is an "ideal order" for the same reason that the past is an "ideal construction" in Knowledge and Experience: it is part of a "system," a product of life in the present. When Eliot summarized his conception of the historical sense in "The Function of Criticism" (1923), he used the word "system" to explain what he meant: I thought of literature then, as I think of it now, of the literature of the world, of the literature of Europe, of the literature of a single country, not as a collection of the writings of individuals, but as "organic wholes," as systems in relation to which, and only in relation to which, individual works of literary art, and the works of individual artists, have their significance. (SE, 12-13) Eliot still believed that an interpretation may be judged true only by its relation to other interpretations. When he wrote in "The Perfect Critic" (1920) that his goal was to "see the object as it really is and find a meaning for the words of Arnold" (SW, 15), he meant that unless we consider truth to be a function of the relations in a "system," Arnold's words will have no meaning; a "fact," the "object as it really is," remains a function of an interpretive strategy. Throughout his career, Eliot recognized that the "trap of

174

CHAPTER 8

interpretation"19 is unavoidable, and he disparaged those critics who do not organize their interpretations into a "system." In "The Perfect Critic" Eliot condemns the impressionistic criticism of Arthur Symons because his "faithful record of impressions" is an "interpretation, a translation; for it must itself impose impressions upon us, and these impressions are as much created as transmitted by the criticism" (SW, 3). Eliot points out right away that "the question is not whether Mr. Symons' impressions are 'true' or 'false.' " The problem is that Symons's impressions are not part of a "system of impressions" (SW, 5,14). His interpretations are inferior because they are not part of a whole and ordered "system." Eliot considers Symons an "incomplete artist" in whom "a work of art arouses all sorts of emotions which . . . are accidents of personal association" (SW, 7). In contrast, Pound is praised, as we have seen, for having "steadily become more modern by becoming, or by showing himself to be, more universal." As the present is no more than the present existence, the present significance, of the entire past, Mr. Pound proceeds by acquiring the entire past; and when the entire past is acquired, the constituents fall into place and the present is revealed.20 Pound succeeds while Symons fails because Pound is the "universal artist"—he has acquired the "entire past," and his interpretations are part of a coherent whole. Symons is the "incomplete artist"; his knowledge is limited, and unlike Pound, he has no "organized view of the whole course of European poetry from Homer."21 Eliot uses the same criteria that Bradley uses in The Presuppositions of Critical History; Symons is the "uncritical historian," Pound the "critical histonan. Eliot was aware that his program "requires a ridiculous amount of erudition" (SW, 52). But erudition alone will not make a "system." Eliot acknowledges that George Wyndham, another imperfect critic, has "read everything," but he does not order his erudition with his emotions and sensations (SW, 28). In "The Metaphysical Poets" (1921) Eliot writes that

BRADLEY AND THE "SYSTEM" OF HISTORY

175

the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes. (SE, 247) Wyndham and Symons are not makers of "wholes"; they have no "system" by which their interpretations can be judged true. Pound is a poet of sensuous, organized vision; this wholeness validates his interpretations. AU interpretation is imperfect impressionism in Eliot's eyes. But like Dilthey, he was interested in establishing plausible criteria for the judgment of interpretation. The "system" or the "ideal order" was a human construction that served as a basis for knowledge. In "Was There a Scottish Literature?" a review Eliot published one month before "Tradition and the Individual Talent" in 1919, he explained that the "system" of tradition is formed from a series of assumptions made by the interpreter—not a series of absolute truths: When we assume that a literature exists we assume a great deal: we suppose that there is one of the five or six (at most) great organic formations of history. We do not suppose merely "a history," for there might be a history of Tamil literature; but a part of History, which for us is the history of Europe. We suppose not merely a corpus of writings in one language, but writings and writers between whom there is a tradition; and writers who are not merely connected by tradition in time, but who are related so as to be in the light of eternity contemporaneous, from a certain point of view cells in one body, Chaucer and Hardy. We suppose a mind which is not only the English mind of one period with its prejudices of politics and fashions of taste, but which is a greater, finer, more positive, more comprehensive mind than the mind of any period. And we suppose to each writer an importance which is not only individual, but due to his place as a constituent of this mind. When we suppose that there is a literature, therefore, we suppose a good deal.22 This is just what Eliot assumed when he wrote about "the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer" in "Tradition and the Individ-

176

CHAPTER 8

ual Talent"; it is what he assumed when he wrote The Waste Land, his interpretation of "the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer." As both poet and critic, Eliot followed Bradley's dictum that to observe correctly "is not to receive a series of chaotic impressions, but to grasp the course of events as a connected whole."23 The speakers of his dramatic monologues are measured by the same criteria by which Eliot measures Symons and Pound. While in The Waste Land he attempted to create a positive articulation of "the whole truth" (KE, 163), his shorter poems present the failure of the interpretive process. For Eliot, to interpret was to be alive: "The soul is so far from being a monad," he wrote in his dissertation, "that we have not only to interpret other souls to ourself but to interpret ourself to ourself" (KE, 148). The personae of Eliot's poems, J. Alfred Prufrock and Gerontion (among many others), face the same dilemma confronted by Pound, Symons, and Eliot himself. The fact that most of his personae fail in their efforts to perceive the world as a coherent "whole," and end up in the category of "incomplete artists" with Symons rather than "universal artists" with Pound, shows just how difficult Eliot considered his demands on the human consciousness to be.

Chapter Nine The Contrived Corridors of Poems 1920

In his preface to The Spirit of Romance Pound made it clear that his interest in mediaeval literature was far from "archaeological": "I am interested in poetry," he wrote. "I have attempted to examine certain forces, elements or qualities which were potent in the mediaeval literature of the Latin tongues, and are, I believe, still potent in our own" (SR, 5). Pound's interest in the literature of the past was always subordinate to his desire to write poetry in the present. Eliot admired this aspect of Pound's work above all others. In "Studies in Contemporary Criticism" (1918) he wrote that Pound's critical writings are the comments of a practitioner upon his own and related arts; and in this type we have very little since Dryden's Prefaces of any permanent value. No one could be farther from the archaeological interest, or farther from the destructive interest: he reserves his attention for the works which he considers good, and for that part of them which he considers permanent.1 Eliot was judging Pound by Pound's own standards. His work was neither "archaeological," like the philological studies Pound deplored, nor "destructive," like the work of the Italian Futurists for whom Pound had as little sympathy. To achieve that via media between what Pound called "pastism" and "futurism" in his 1914 essay on Wyndham Lewis, Pound and Eliot agreed that the critic must be a practitioner of the art he criticizes. Eliot complained in The Sacred Wood that the word "tradition" is too often associated with "the reassuring science of archaeology" (SW, 47). To prevent a study of poetry from becoming "archaeological," says Eliot, one must have a "creative interest" in the past, a focus upon the immediate future. The important critic is the person who is absorbed in the present problems of art, and who wishes

178

CHAPTER 9

to bring the forces of the past to bear upon the solution of these problems. If the critic consider Congreve, for instance, he will have always at the back of his mind the question: What has Congreve got that is pertinent to our dramatic art? Even if he is solely engaged in trying to understand Congreve, this will make all the difference; inasmuch as to understand anything is to understand from a point of view. (SW, 38) Eliot recognized that the scope of interpretation is necessarily defined by the shape of the individual interpreter's "point of view," but he did not believe that all perspectives were equally useful. Like Pound, Eliot set out to be a critic with a "creative interest" in the past, and all his historical studies were undertaken with the design of his poetry in mind. Eliot's poetry falls into the category Pound called "criticism in new composition" (LE, 75), the very highest form of criticism, combining a knowledge of the past with a passion for the present. The Waste Land may be seen as an interpretation of "the whole course of European poetry from Homer." "The Death of the Duchess," a poem Eliot included among his drafts for The Waste Land, presents an interpretation of Webster's The Duchess of Malfi. But "The Death of the Duchess" does not present an interpretation that Eliot considered ideal. More complicated than a "criticism in new composition," this poem reveals an extraordinary self-consciousness about the interpretive process. It exhibits not only an "historical sense" but (as Eliot wrote of Henry James) a "sense of the sense." The speaker of this poem, like Arthur Symons, is a limited, "incomplete critic," and "The Death of the Duchess" is designed to reveal the dangers of the trap of interpretation. "The Death of the Duchess" is a useful poem with which to illustrate the interpretive strategies that contribute to the construction of Eliot's poetry for a number of reasons: first, because the poem was not published until 1971 in The Waste Land facsimile, it is not burdened byfiftyyears of critical exegesis; second, because Eliot never finished the poem, the kinks and seams of its construction are more visible; third, because Eliot wrote a review of a production oiThe Duchess of

POEMS 1920

179

Malfi at about the same time that he wrote "The Death of the Duchess," we have more information about Eliot's thoughts on the interpretation of Webster. The similarities between this 1919 review and the poem are so striking that I am led to believe that the production may have been the inspiration for the poem.2 In the review, " 'The Duchess of Malfi' at the Lyric: and Poetic Drama," Eliot applies his theories of interpretation to the production ofThe Duchess ofMalfi. The production fails because it interprets the play: For poetry is something which the actor cannot improve or "interpret"; there is no such thing as the interpretation of poetry; poetry can only be transmitted; in consequence, the ideal actor for a poetic drama is the actor with no personal vanity? Eliot himself would have admitted that there is no way to escape interpretation; but he believed that the function of criticism is "the correction of taste" (SE, 13), and he relaxed his rigorous philosophical understanding of the inescapability of interpretation in order to correct the taste for excessively personal styles of acting and literary criticism. More consistent with his philosophical position that there are degrees of truth in interpretation, Eliot goes on to explain that the production is a bad interpretation of Webster because it was not founded on a "system." He concedes that "the first scene between the Cardinal and his mistress was well done" because "it was simply the scene which most closely resembled a modern social comedy, and the actors were on more familiar and easy ground." Those portions of The Duchess of Malfi which could be absorbed into a modern horizon of expectations were not damaged by a modern interpretation. Aspects of the play that were completely alien to the dramatic horizon dominated by Ibsen and Shaw, such as "the scene of the severed hand," were also safe because "the actors were held in check by violent situations which nothing in their previous repertory could teach them to distort."4 Most of the play, however, was damaged by the actors' interpretation. Eliot directs most of his criticism at the way "the dressing-room scene" (3.2) was played. The Duchess, safe in her private world, brushes her hair and speaks with Antonio, the steward she has secretly

CHAPTER 9

180

married. While her back is turned, the playful Antonio slips from the room. Unknown to either of them, Ferdinand, the Duchess' evil brother, enters the room and hears her self-incriminating speech. In "the dressing-room scene," writes Eliot, "there was never a moment" when the actress playing the Duchess was the Duchess: she was, at every moment, Miss Catherine Nesbitt "making" a part. And when she came to the lines ". . . . does not my hair 'gin to change? When I grow old, I shall have all the court Powder their hair with arras, to be like me." she continued to make the part, and ruined the lines. We required only that she should transmit the lines, but to transmit the lines is beyond the self-control of a modern actor, and so she did what the modern actor does: she "interpreted" them. She had to throw in a little titter, a feminine gesture or two, a hint of archness, and she became, not the Duchess, but somelike the respondent in a drama of divorce.5 The actress has fallen into the trap of interpretation, says Eliot, because she has imposed her limited personal and historical prejudices on the text instead of expanding the scope and knowledge of her "system" to incorporate the play. She is the "incomplete artist," as Eliot writes in "The Perfect Critic," in whom "a work of art arouses all sorts of emotions which . . . are accidents of personal association" (SW, 7). She turns the dressing-room scene into a drama of divorce. In the poem "The Death of the Duchess" Eliot also focuses on the dressing-room scene, and he quotes the same lines that he quotes in the review. The speaker assumes the role of Antonio, while his wife assumes the posture of the duchess. And oddly enough, the poem does exactly that for which Eliot criticizes the production of the play: it presents The Duchess ofMalfi as a "drama of divorce." In The Duchess ofMalfi the Duchess' chambers are her secret refuge, the only place she can enjoy her life with Antonio and her children. Ferdinand invades and destroys that world. In "The Death of the Duchess" this enclosed space becomes a psychological prison, which is depicted in

POEMS 1920

181

lines now familiar from The Waste Land: "we shall play a game of chess,/ Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door" (CPP, 41). But in "The Death of the Duchess" the woman "making the part" of the Duchess adds the line "But I know you love me, it must be that you love me" to the lines Eliot quotes from Webster in his review: "When I grow old, I shall have all the court Powder their hair with arras, to be like me. But I know you love me, it must be that you love me." Then I suppose they found her As she turned To interrogate the silence fixed behind her. (WLF, 107) Earlier in this drama of divorce, we hear another of Eliot's touchstones from the dressing-room scene of The Duchess ofMalfi (in "Reflections on vers libre" Eliot quotes these lines as an example of one of the "moments of the highest intensity" in Webster's verse): You have cause to love me, I did enter you in my heart Before you would vouchsafe to call for the keys. (TCC, 116) In "The Death of the Duchess" these lines are spoken by the woman "making the part" of the Duchess: Under the brush her hair Spread out in little fiery points of will Glowed into words, then was suddenly still. "You have cause to love me, I did enter you in my heart Before ever you vouchsafed to ask for the key". (WLF, 105) Several of these lines, torn from the dramatic context that "The Death of the Duchess" provides, found their way into The Waste Land.6 But it is the dramatic context of the shorter poem that presents The Duchess ofMalfi as a drama of divorce. "The Death of the Duchess" has usually been read as a relatively uninteresting and somewhat maudlin confession of Eliot's strained relations with his first wife.7 Like so many of his poems, however, "The Death of the Duchess" is built around the tension between his

182

CHAPTER 9

desire for confessional exorcism and his need for constricting structure: what may seem to be purely self-indulgent autobiographical confession is actually part of a self-conscious interpretive strategy. To borrow some terms Eliot used in his Clark Lectures (1926), "The Death of the Duchess" is a "phenomenological" rather than an "ontological" poem; like "Prufrock" or "Gerontion" it emphasizes not the speaker's vision but the psychological mannerisms of the speaker's dramatic posture.8 The triumphs of Eliot's early work are "phenomenological" poems, poems spoken by firmly characterized personae. "The Death of the Duchess" recalls the hesitating, Jamesian voice of "Prufrock." Like Prufrock, the speaker of "The Death of the Duchess" vacillates between saying "I love you" and "I do not love you" and finally says nothing at all. And like Prufrock, this speaker fits Eliot's description of the worst kind of interpreter: his impressions of his surroundings "are as much created as transmitted" by his interpretation. None of "the accidents of personal association" are removed from his discourse (SW, 3,7). While Prufrock laments that he "should have been a pair of ragged claws" (CPP, 5), the speaker of "The Death of the Duchess" says he "should like to be in a crowd of beaks without words": We should have marble floors And firelight on your hair There will be no footsteps up and down the stair. (WLF, 105) In these lines it is impossible to tell how much of the speaker's description refers to the exterior world and how much to his interpretation of it: although he has just said that "We should have marble floors /And firelight on your hair," implying that they have neither, he goes on to say, With her back turned, her arms were bare Fixed for a question, her hands behind her hair And the firelight shining where the muscle drew. (WLF, 107) His contradictory interpretations have no wholeness, no coherency, and consequently, no claim for truth. He cannot amalgamate his perceptions into a "system"; his thoughts "drop one by one upon the

POEMS 1920

183

floor." Among his disorganized thoughts are several lines he recalls from a bad production of The Duchess ofMalfi: "What words have we?" he asks, and the answer is none; when the speaker's partner finally speaks, she speaks the words of the Duchess ofMalfi: "When I grow old, I shall have all the court Powder their hair with arras, to be like me But I know you love me, it must be that you love me." (WLF, 107) By this point in the poem, we cannot be sure if the speaker's wife has actually spoken. The speaker has imagined that the "fiery points" of her hair "glowed into words," and it is likely that he supplies her with a script of The Duchess ofMalfi and imagines her speech. The speaker of "The Death of the Duchess" is an actor, and he transforms his own world into the dressing-room scene of The Duchess of Malfi. Even worse, he is a bad actor, a bad interpreter, whose response to the text of the play "is made up of comment and opinion, and also new emotions which are vaguely applied to his own life" (SW, 6-7). Webster's play exists only as a part of the speaker's drama of divorce. Although Eliot writes that the goal of his criticism is to find a meaning for the Arnoldian phrase, "to see the object as it really is," he also writes, echoing Wilde, that a moment of dramatic self-consciousness in a play exposes "the human will to see things as they are not" (SE, 111). In "The Death of the Duchess" Eliot is a self-conscious dramatist. Although the poem may present a portrait of his own marriage, it is a portrait framed with self-consciousness; it is not Eliot but Eliot's narrator who turns The Duchess ofMalfi into a drama of divorce. "To realize that a point of view is a point of view," Eliot writes in his dissertation, "is already to have transcended it" (KE, 148). He knows that the point of view of "The Death of the Duchess" is a limited, disorganized point of view; his speaker does not. Eliot seems to have had an inordinately strong faith in the power of self-consciousness to save him from the implications of his own writing, but "The Death of the Duchess" is nevertheless more than a crass generalization from autobiography. The poem is built around the same issues of interpretation that Eliot addresses in his review oiThe Duchess ofMalfi. And if he saw

CHAPTER 9

184

himself in his speaker, then the poem is Eliot's judgment of his own inability to organize his perceptions into a unified whole. "The Death of the Duchess" is not unique among Eliot's poetry; most of the poems Eliot wrote before 1922 can be elucidated by reading them in light of his own theories of "system" and interpretation. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "Mr. Apollinax," "Portrait of a Lady," "Rhapsody on a Windy Night," and "Gerontion" are all "phenomenological" poems, poems spoken by personae who fall into the trap of interpretation. Eliot's preference for this mode probably grew, in part, from his desire to write poems that express "an organized view of the whole course of European poetry" by alluding to many texts. Eliot recognized in After Strange Gods, however, that "in one's prose reflexions one may be legitimately occupied with ideals, whereas in the writing of verse one can only deal with actuality" (ASG, 30). Eliot realized that in practice such an attempt to grasp the "whole truth" was doomed to failure; consequently he framed his allusions within the limited, incoherent point of view of his speakers in order to show the failure of the quest for wholeness and the failure of interpretation. The archetypical persona of Eliot's early poetry is not the "universal artist" who has "acquired the entire past," but Sweeney: (The lengthened shadow of a man Is history, said Emerson Who had not seen the silhouette Of Sweeney straddled in the sun.) (CPP, 26) Eliot's personae exhibit none of the historical sense that Eliot himself considered so essential. In classical mythology, true visions rise through the gates of horn; in Eliot's poetry, the gates are guarded by an imperfect critic: "Sweeney guards the horned gate" (CPP, 35). Although they are not dramatic monologues, several of Eliot's quatrain poems from Poems 1920 are nevertheless "phenomenological" poems structured by interpretive strategies. As Ronald Bush points out, Eliot borrows techniques from fiction writing in "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar" and describes Venice using the phrases and attitudes of his characters: "The stanzas do not present a

POEMS 1920

185

narrator's mock-epic comment on Burbank; they render Burbank's own sensibility":9 Defunctive music under sea Passed seaward with the passing bell Slowly: the God Hercules Had left him, that had loved him well. The horses, under the axletree Beat up the dawn from Istria With even feet. Her shuttered barge Burned on the water all the day. (CPP, 24) The allusions to Shakespeare, Marston, and Horace that crowd these stanzas do not simply force a comparison between the present decay of Venice and its past glories; they express Burbank's inability to see that his understanding of Venice's past is conditioned by his experience of the present. Eliot learned from Bradley that ideas about the past "do not qualify a real past . . . for there is no real past . . . for them to qualify. . . . Ideas of the past are true, not by correspondence with a real past, but by their coherence with each other and ultimately with the present moment" (KE, 54). Burbank's grand ideas about the past have no relation to the present, no coherence among themselves, and he is doomed to discover that his interpretation of his surroundings is false: Who clipped the lion's wings And flea'd his rump and pared his claws? Thought Burbank, meditating on Time's ruin and the seven laws. (CPP, 24) The point of Eliot's historical sense is not that the past is better or worse than the present; such a comparison would assume that the historian could know the past "as it was," unaffected by his own subjective or historical prejudices. The past is either accessible or inaccessible for Eliot, part of a coherent "system" or lost in the rubble of fragmentary vision. Any expression of historical progress or decline is thus an illusion, a product of an interpreter's inability to realize that

186

CHAPTER 9

he does not know the "real" past but an interpretation of the past made possible by the present. In his construction of poems including history, Pound also tried to avoid an implicitly judgmental comparison of past and present. In 1933 he declared openly that the point of The Cantos "is not a dualism of past against present. Monism is pretty bad but dualism (Miltonic puritanism, etc.) is just plain lousy."10 The juxtapositions of the modern and ProvenQal worlds in Pound's Quia Pauper Amavi (1919) do suggest such a dualism despite his intentions: side by side, it is difficult not to see the more noble vision of "Langue d'Oc" as an implicit commentary on the facile world satirized in "Moeurs Contemporaines." Yet at around the same time that Pound published this volume, he criticized historians with a purely antiquarian interest in the past for establishing exactly this kind of judgmental comparison: "The star turn of the ancientists is to play all antiquity, or the cream of antiquity, against the unselected product of a particular decade or century."11 Because readers of Pound and Eliot have so often thought that this is exactly what they were doing, it is important to understand just how the juxtaposition of various points in history functions in their poetry. Pound recognized that a simple juxtaposition of past and present seems to imply an evaluation. In "James Joyce et Pecuchet," an analysis of Joyce and Flaubert published in the Mercure de France after the appearance of Ulysses, Pound contrasted Flaubert's Trots Contes, in which three tableaux—pagan, mediaeval, and modern—are juxtaposed with the more supple historicism ofJoyce's novel: "Joyce combine Ie moyen age, les eres classiques, meme l'antiquite juive, dans une action actuelle; Flaubert echelonne les epoques" (PJ, 207) [Joyce combines the middle ages, the classical age, even Jewish antiquity, in a current action; Flaubert strings out the epochs].12 Pound was probably thinking ofCanzoni, his own attempt to "string out the epochs," when he wrote this sentence. Part of his admiration for Joyce's work stemmed from Joyce's ability to build up palimpsest-like Iayerings of history in his novel rather than drawing contrasts between different epochs. And if Joyce influenced Pound's decision to move his AngloSaxon-style translation of the Odyssey to the beginning oiThe Cantos,

POEMS 1920

187

I think it was because Pound wanted to emphasize that The Cantos, like Ulysses, would present history as a layered present, a "system." Pound's desire to avoid the misleadingly simple juxtapositions of Quia Pauper Amavi probably accounts for the much more complicated structure of A Draft ofXVI Cantos. Like Croce, Pound and Eliot recognized that all history "is contemporary history"—that the past does not exist except in the context of the present. By the early 1930s, however, the reading of The Waste Land as what Pound called "the star turn of the ancientists" ("to play all antiquity . . . against the unselected product of a particular decade or century") had already become a commonplace. In Exile's Return (1934) Malcolm Cowley could even explain that "the idea was zsimple one": Beneath the rich symbolism of The Waste Land, the wide learning expressed in seven languages, the actions conducted on three planes, the musical episodes, the geometrical structure—beneath and by means of all this, we felt the poet was saying that the present is inferior to the past. The past was dignified; the present is barren of emotion.13 When Eliot read Exile's Return he wrote to Paul Elmer More that he felt that Cowley perpetuated a misunderstanding of The Waste Land that had arisen at the time of its publication. Eliot explained to More that he was never conscious of drawing a contrast between the present and a more lovely past, that there was no nostalgia for an earlier, more attractive world; he maintained that such a perspective on the past was illusory.14 In explaining his intentions to More, Eliot was returning an idea that he had learned from More himself: in his essay on the criticism of Matthew Arnold (published in the seventh series oiShelburne Essays [1910]), More had criticized Arnold for using "the past too much as a dead storehouse of precepts for schoolmastering the present" instead of making a "conscious creation of the field of the present out of the past."15 Eliot had absorbed More's lesson early on, for in The Sacred Wood he quoted these sentences, criticizing M. Julien Benda for not partaking in "that 'conscious creation of the field of the

188

CHAPTER 9

present out of the past' which Mr. More considers to be part of the work of the critic" (SW, 46). When examining any of Eliot's often cryptic comments about his intentions in The Waste Land such as his response to Cowley, it is important to remember that Eliot himself believed that "what a poem means is as much what it means to others as what it means to an author; and indeed, in the course of time a poet may become merely a reader in respect to his own work, forgetting his original meaning— or without forgetting, merely changing" (UPUC, 130). Despite Eliot's claims to the contrary, his poetry does sometimes (in More's words) use "the past too much as a dead storehouse of precepts for schoolmastering the present." Constructing palimpsest-like poems including history was no easy task, and Eliot occasionally slipped into the easy, dualistic comparisons that mar Pound's Quia Pauper Amavi. In "A Cooking Egg" from Poems 1920, for instance, Eliot does fall into a facile comparison of a noble past with a desiccated present: Where are the eagles and trumpets? Buried beneath some snow-deep Alps. Over buttered scones and crumpets Weeping, weeping multitudes Droop in a hundred A.B.C.'s. (CPP, 27) The central thrust of Eliot's historical sense does not depend on these ironies, however; when he compiled The Waste Land he eliminated most of the passages that turn on an implicitly judgmental comparison of the past and present. These lines, drafted among many variants, were intended for "The Fire Sermon": To Aeneas, in an unfamiliar place Appeared his mother, with an altered face, He knew the goddess by her smooth celestial pace. So the close rabble in the cinema Identify a goddess or a star In silent rapture worship from afar. (WFL, 29) Eliot fine-tuned his own sense of the past as he composed The Waste Land, and he concentrated his attention on those passages that ex-

POEMS 1920

189

press the existential historicism he gleaned from Bradley: the "Unreal City" passage in "The Burial of the Dead" (CPP, 39), for instance, in which Dante's fourteenth-century Florence, Webster's seventeenthcentury London, and Baudelaire's nineteenth-century Paris are all brought to bear upon twentieth-century London in a complex tissue of allusions. Knowledge of the past and knowledge of the present are inextricably entwined. In a 1919 review of an anthology of Amerian Indian songs and chants, Eliot wrote, The maxim, Return to the sources, is a good one. More intelligibly put, it is that the poet should know everything that has been accomplished in poetry (accomplished, not merely produced) since its beginning—in order to know what he is doing himself. He should be aware of all the metamorphoses of poetry that illustrate thestratifications of history that cover savagery.16 Here Eliot repeats the praise he offered Ezra Pound ("As the present is no more than the present existence . . . of the entire past, Mr. Pound proceeds by acquiring the entire past") as a maxim for all poets. Eliot believed that we necessarily understand the past through the present, and The Waste Land reveals his own attempt to "know everything that has been accomplished in poetry" and reveal "the stratifications of history" in a palimpsest-like present. The Waste Land is Eliot's most comprehensive "system," his most ambitious effort to express his own "organized view of the whole course of European poetry from Homer." Once we understand Eliot's appropriation of Bradley's conception of the "system" and the "critical historian," it becomes clear that the famous passage on history in "Gerontion" is not a statement with which Eliot would agree. After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions, Guides us by vanities. Think now She gives when our attention is distracted And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions

190

CHAPTER 9

That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late What's not believed in, or if still believed, In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon Into weak hands, what's thought can be dispensed with Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes. These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree. (CPP, 22) This passage is Eliot's most elaborate description of the point of view of the "imperfect critic" or the "uncritical historian." Bradley writes that because the "uncritical historian" is unable to amalgamate his knowledge in a "system," he necessarily sees any new knowledge about the past as a threat to his understanding of history: Impotent to deny the existence of these [new] facts, and powerless to explain them, the uncritical consciousness refuses to advance, or advancing loses all hold on reality. It is forced to see in the place of its reproduction an origination, in the place of its witness a writer of fiction, in the place of its fact a theory; and its consistent issue is the barren scepticism which sees in history but a weary labyrinth of truth and tangled falsehood, whose clue is buried and lost in the centuries that lie behind.17 This is Gerontion's plight. He finds history deceptive because he cannot incorporate "such knowledge" into the constantly expanding wholeness of a "system." What's more, he has lost his "sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch" (CPP, 23) and cannot possibly acquire the sensuous knowledge essential for the formation of a "system." His history is the weary labyrinth of his own mind. Hugh Kenner has noticed that Eliot's characterization of Senecan drama provides a fair description of "Gerontion." In the Greek drama, says Eliot, "we are always conscious of a concrete visual actuality," while in the plays of Seneca "the drama is all in the word, and the word has no further reality behind it" (SE, 53, 54).18 Part of the reason for the extraordinary difficulty of "Gerontion" is its conspic-

POEMS 1920

191

uous lack of the concrete visual images that illuminate even the most obscure passages of The Waste Land. "Gerontion" is all talk. Signs are taken for wonders. "We would see a sign!" The word within a word, unable to speak a word, Swaddled with darkness. (CPP, 21) Here Gerontion has quoted St. Matthew's report of the pharisees' challenge to Christ ("We would see a sign!") and has followed it with a line from Lancelot Andrewes's Nativity Sermon on that text ("The word within a word, unable to speak a word"). In his 1926 essay on Andrewes, Eliot remarks that Andrewes is "extracting all the spiritual meaning of a text" in this passage (SE, 307).19 That is precisely what Gerontion cannot do. Andrewes is talking about the logos, the Word within the word. Gerontion's words have no metaphysical buttressing, and his language is studded with puns, words within words. The passage on history is a series of metaphors that dissolve into incomprehensibility: History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions, Guides us by vanities. Gerontion has already described himself as "an old man in a draughty house," and his "house" of history has its corridors and passages and issues. Written histories also have "cunning passages," and historians write about "issues." Gerontion's history is also a woman: She gives when our attention is distracted And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late What's not believed in, or if still believed, In memory only, reconsidered passion. From Eliot's point of view, this is merely self-deception. Given the idealist historicism that Eliot inherited from Bradley, history cannot possibly be an "other," separated from the self who conceives it. By presenting history as something other than an "ideal construction," a

192

CHAPTER 9

product of his own mind, Gerontion shifts the blame for his own situation from himself onto history: Gives too soon Into weak hands, what's thought can be dispensed with Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes. Neither passive fear not active courage will save us, says Gerontion, because history has duped us, perverting our heroic intentions. Gerontion's understanding of history is a rationalization of his own inability to act or feel. It is to his advantage to be what Bradley calls an "uncritical historian" or what Eliot calls an "imperfect critic." Unlike Eliot, the speaker of "Gerontion" does not understand that his knowledge of history is his own "ideal construction," and that a vision of historical chaos is a product of the mind that cannot unify the present and the past. As I mentioned in the introduction, Eliot's drafts for "Gerontion" show that the passage on history was finished in all but one crucial point before other sections of the poem were given their final forms. In his last revision, Eliot altered only one word: he substituted "history" for "nature."20 Had the change not been made, our sense of the entire poem would be drastically different; on a much smaller scale, I want to point out that Eliot's substitution of "history" for "nature" confirms the fact that the word "history" is to be understood in "Gerontion" not as a sequence of events in the "real" past but as an "ideal construction" of those events: history is not the same thing as nature, the real world outside us. Even nature is an "ideal construction" for Eliot, a fabrication of the mind: in his essay on Tennyson's In Memoriam (1936) he writes of "that strange abstraction, 'Nature' " (SE, 292). Eliot's substitution of the word "history" emphasizes what his persona in "Gerontion" does not understand: that history is not something separate from the life of the individual in the present. In a 1921 "London Letter" to the New York Dial Eliot ventured a comment on Shaw that shows how different his own view of history

POEMS 1920

193

was from the one he presented in "Gerontion." Traditionally, the vision of anarchy and decline in "Gerontion" (1919) has been considered a close relation of Yeats's "The Second Coming" and Shaw's Heartbreak House; in his preface to the play, Shaw wrote that the First World War finally collapsed a civilization that for "half a century . . . had been going to the devil."21 For Eliot, Shaw's historical pessimism "is pessimism only because he has not realized that at the end he has only approached a beginning, that his end is only the starting point towards the knowledge of life." Shaw has failed to understand that "as Mr. Bradley says, 'whatever you know, it is all one.' '^2 Eliot invokes Bradley (and prefigures the language of the Bradleyan opening of "East Coker") in order to point out that Shaw is unable to organize his knowledge into the oneness of a "system"; he is another "uncritical historian." By the time Eliot wrote "Gerontion," the question of the nature and direction of history had become a topic for popular journalism, and a vision of historical pessimism was shared by many European intellectuals. Given Eliot's Bradleyan understanding of history, "Gerontion" emerges as an implicit criticism of this postwar despondency. "Gerontion" is Eliot's most exacting portrayal of the trap of interpretation; the wholeness and order necessary for the proper interpretation of the past are exactly what Eliot's persona cannot muster. "Gerontion" itself emerges as a trap for Eliot's readers, too eager to find their own feelings of cultural despair in his work.23 It has often been claimed that The Education ofHenry Adams is the source of Eliot's ideas about history in "Gerontion"; Eliot reviewed the book in May 1919, and the line "In depraved May, dogwood, and chestnut, flowering judas" (CPP, 21) owes something to the opening of Chapter 18 ofThe Education .24 Given Eliot's early interest in Bradley, and given the fact that Bradley's ideas about history are compatible with those of many other philosophers of history of the period, it seems unlikely that Adams is the "source" of Eliot's ideas; however, The Education was surely fresh in Eliot's mind when he wrote "Gerontion." If we read The Education ofHenry Adams as a statement of naive historical pessimism, the story of how Adams broke his "historical

194

CHAPTER 9

neck," then "Gerontion" would emerge as an implicit criticism of Adams's understanding of history, just as it is an implicit criticism of Shaw. Previous examinations of Adams and Eliot have read both The Education and "Gerontion" as works that arise from heartfelt historical pessimism. But The Education is a work very much like "Gerontion" in a different way: the "Henry Adams" of The Education is as much a false persona as the speaker of "Gerontion." And the view of history held by "Henry Adams" in The Education differs sharply from Adams's own view of history. The Education of Henry Adams is a book about failure. The first twenty chapters, culminating in a chapter titled "Failure," chronicle the disappointments of the life of "Henry Adams"; the final fifteen chapters outline the development of an historicism based on a vision of the failure of history. But is is important to notice two things about this pattern of failure: first, that Henry Adams (the man, not the "manikin" of The Education, "Henry Adams," whom I crown with quotation marks) led a life that was not consistently marked with failure, and that Adams misrepresented the facts of his autobiography in The Education; second, that in a book that chronicles the failure of "Henry Adams" the historian and presents history as a disordered labyrinth, this pattern of failure acts as a positive ordering principle, providing both narrative and historical coherence.25 The point of The Education is that order exists only in our interpretations of history, and like "Gerontion" the book is a massively deceptive demonstration of its own doctrine. The Education is about the education of its readers. Adams's first major historical work, The History of the United States during the Administrations ofJefferson and Madison (1884—1891), is a chronologically structured and thoroughly researched history. But with Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (finished in 1902 and published in 1904) Adams adopted an essentially "existential" historicism. To borrow Jameson's description of existential historicism once again, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres is not concerned with the construction of "this or that linear or evolutionary or genetic history, but rather designates something like a transhistorical event: the experience, rather, by which historicity as such is manifested, by means of the con-

POEMS 1920

195

tact between the historian's mind in the present and a given synchronic cultural complex in the past."26 Like Pater's or Burckhardt's studies of the Renaissance, Adams's book is a study of a single cultural complex in the past, a reconstruction of the spirit of mediaeval life through its art and religion. But Adams did not believe that he had recovered the "real" past, and he was not concerned with the recovery of the "real" past, but with a past reconstructed in and for the present. He defended Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres to Henry Osborne Taylor, another student of the Middle Ages, by explaining that to me, accuracy is relative, I care very little whether my details are exact, if only my ensemble is in scale. . . . Your middle ages exist for their own sake, not for ours. To me, who stands in gaping wonder before this preposterous spectacle of thought. . . the middle ages present a picture that has somehow to be brought into relation with ourselves.27 For Adams, all historical truth exists in relations; like Eliot, he believes that we measure the truth of an idea about the past not by measuring it against a "real" past but by its relations to other ideas. This is what the "Henry Adams" of The Education does not understand. In a famous passage the narrator explains how "Henry Adams" broke his "historical neck": Historians undertake to arrange sequences,—called stories, or histories—assuming in silence a relation of cause and effect. . . . Satisfied that the sequence of men led to nothing and that the sequence of their society could lead no further, while the mere sequence of time was artificial, and the sequence of thought was chaos, he turned at last to the sequence of force; and thus it happened that, after ten years' pursuit, he found himself lying in the Gallery of Machines at the Great Exposition of 1900, his historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new. For "Henry Adams," history has no order, no continuity. "In essence incoherent and immoral, history had to be taught as such—or falsified. . . . Adams wanted to do neither. He had no theory of evolution to teach, and could not make the facts fit one."28 "Henry Adams" con-

196

CHAPTER 9

eludes that he cannot make history cohere. But in the very act of writing The Education, Henry Adams has brought the present into relation with the past and ordered his history. Unlike "Henry Adams"—and unlike the speaker of "Gerontion" but like Eliot—Adams did not give up his search for a "system" to accommodate the facts of history; he understood that a system of relations is the only thing that allows us to know these "facts." In "The Rule of Phase" (1909) and "A Letter to American Teachers of History" (1910)—both written after The Education—Adams continued to search for a "great generalization" that could order the events of history. In "The Rule of Phase" Adams suggests the use of Willard Gibbs's theory of the equilibrium of heterogeneous substances, and in the "Letter" he offers Kelvin's second law of thermodynamics as a means to order history. Adams did not make the mistake of confusing history with nature; he did not believe that these scientific principles uncovered an order inherent in history, and he did not even believe that these principles, when employed by scientists, uncovered an inherent order in nature: The physicist, who affects psychology, will regard religion as the self-projection of the mind into nature in one direction, as science is the projection of mind into nature in another. Both are illusions, as the metaphysician conceives, and in neither case does—or can— the mind reach anything but a different reflection of its own features.29 All truth, whether historical or scientific, remains a function of an interpretive strategy. In his "Letter to American Teachers of History" Adams insists that his "great generalizations" from the world of science be understood as imposed interpretations, as "approximations to truth": If the teacher of history cares to contest the ground with the teacher of physics, he must become a physicist himself, and learn to use laboratory methods. He needs technical tools quite as much as the electrician does; large formulas, like Willard Gibbs's Rule of Phases; generalizations, no matter how temporary or hypothetical, such as all mathematicians use for the convenience of their science.

POEMS 1920

197

The whole field of physics is covered with such temporary structures, mere approximations to truth, but in constant demand as tools. Adams goes on to say that the appropriation of Kelvin's theory of entropy as a model for historical decline has already become dangerous because historians have looked to the theory for "absolute Truth": Instead of being a mere convenience in treatment, the law is very rapidly becoming a dogma of absolute Truth. As long as the theory of Degradation,—as of Evolution,—was only one of the convenient tools of science, the sociologist had no just cause for complaint.30 Like Eliot, Adams believes that a vision of historical chaos is as much a product of a point of view as a vision of order. And both men required the historian to have some kind of "great generalization" or "ideal construction" by which he orders his world. We cannot know exactly how Eliot read The Education, whether he noticed Adams's Carlylean clue that the "Henry Adams" of the book is a "manikin," that the "object of the study is the garment" that the manikin wears, and that the "tailor [Henry Adams himself] adapts the manikin as well as the clothes to his patron's wants."31 Eliot writes in his review of The Education that "wherever this man stepped, the ground did not simply give way, it flew in particles."32 And it seems likely that Eliot is talking about Henry Adams the man, not the manikin. But what is finally most interesting about "Gerontion" and The Education is not the question of influence, but the similarity of their visions of history and their means for presenting those visions. Both works present a persona, distinct from the author, who does perceive the world giving way into particles; yet both works are deceptive in that the fragmentary vision of the world is not held up as being desirable or necessary, but simply the result of an inferior way of interpreting. When "Henry Adams" becomes depressed over his realization that "chaos was the law of nature; order was the dream of man,"33 he has, like the persona of "Gerontion," made the mistake of thinking that there is an order that exists naturally in the world. For Adams and Eliot, the fact that order comes from interpretation is not depressing; it is simply the point of departure.

198

CHAPTER 9

Along with Dilthey, Bradley, and Croce, Adams and Eliot were nurtured by an age obsessed with the idea of history. That idea was seriously threatened by the realization that any assertion we make about the world is necessarily an imperfect interpretation. But each of these writers sought to provide principles that would make historical knowledge possible for the modern world. Eliot's 1921 "London Letter" (from which I have already quoted his remarks about Shaw) provides a neat summary of the conception of history that is central to both his and Adams's work. While half of the letter is devoted to Shaw, the other half is about Stravinsky's L· Sacre du Printemps. The comparison—which Eliot does not make but invites by juxtaposition—is elucidating: Shaw presents a "teleological" or "evolutionary" historicism, while Stravinsky's work embodies what I have called an existential historicism in which the past is seen only through the eyes of the present. Eliot criticizes the dancing of the Sacre because it seemed a stale reconstruction of primitive rites—it was "antiquarian," it embodied none of the life of the present. Stravinsky's music, on the other hand, like Frazer's The Golden Bough, reveals the interpenetration and continuity of past and present: In art there should be interpenetration and metamorphosis. Even The Golden Bough can be read in two ways: as a collection of entertaining myths, or as a revelation of that vanished mind of which our mind is a continuation. In everything in the Sacre du Printemps, except in the music, one missed the sense of the present. Whether Stravinsky's music be permanent or ephemeral I do not know; but it did seem to transform the rhythm of the steppes into the scream of the motor horn, the rattle of machinery, the grind of wheels, the beating of iron and steel, the roar of the underground railway, and the other barbaric cries of modern life; and to transform these despairing noises into music.34 Unlike Shaw, Stravinsky understands that "as Mr. Bradley says, 'whatever you know, it is all one.' " His music combines the past and present in the wholeness of a "system." In his own poetry, Eliot rarely juxtaposes the past with the present in order to reveal the grandeur of the past or to aggrandize or diminish the present; only an imperfect

POEMS 1920

199

interpreter such as Shaw or Symons or the speakers of "The Death of the Duchess" or "Gerontion" understands history in that way. Like Bradley or Adams, Eliot thought of the past and the present as continuous parts of a unified whole. And while "Gerontion" shows how one interpreter fails to understand that wholeness, The Waste Land reveals Eliot's own attempt to approach the whole truth.

Chapter Ten

The Waste Land: Beyond the Frontier

"And of course the only real truth is the whole truth" (KE, 163). This sentence is one of the most telling that Eliot ever wrote. Not only does it epitomize his ideas about the nature of tenable criteria for truth, but it reveals how self-evident he considered those criteria to be; the "of course" is particularly telling. Furthermore, this sentence, and Eliot's general dependence upon the idea of wholeness and the "systematic" nature of truth, reveal his strong reliance upon nineteenth-century traditions in both philosophy and poetry. Hegel provided the locus classicus of this tradition when he wrote in the Phenomenology of Mind that the "truth is the whole. The whole, however, is merely the essential nature reaching its completeness through the process of its own development."1 In nineteenth-century German philosophy, this emphasis upon the wholeness of truth gave rise to the "hermeneutic circle," given its most famous articulation by Schleiermacher, and reformulated by Eliot in his essay on "The 'Pensees' of Pascal" (1931): "We cannot quite understand any of the parts, fragmentary as they are, without some understanding of the whole" (SE, 368). Understanding is a dialectic between the part and the whole, and we cannot understand any individual part without some prior knowledge of the whole. The same emphasis on the priority of wholeness lies behind Coleridge's famous formulation of the symbol: in contrast to allegory, a symbol is characterized by a translucence of the Special in the Individual or of the General in the Especial or of the Universal in the General. Above all by the translucence of the Eternal through and in the Temporal. It always partakes of the Reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part of that Unity, of which it is the representative.2

THE WASTE LAND

201

Eliot is an inheritor of this Romantic desire to embody "the whole truth" when he praises the wide scope of Pound's Cantos. In his own work, The Waste Land stands as an even more striking offspring of this tradition. Poems such as "The Death of the Duchess" or "Gerontion" express only the negative side of Eliot's philosophy. Trapped within limited points of view, the speakers of these poems fail miserably. From the very moment of its publication The Waste Land has also been read as a poem of failure, a poem of fragments that articulates a painful nostalgia for a wholeness that is no longer possible. Surely the poem does crystallize, both formally and thematically, around the line, "These fragments I have shored against my ruins" (CPP, 50); but Eliot himself emphasized in 1923 that uThe Waste Land is intended to form a whoL·."3 The emphasis upon fragmentation is made possible by Eliot's belief that truth is wholeness; the very idea of a fragment implies the idea of a unified whole of which it is a part. In his Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin Thomas McFarland makes this point with characteristic elegance. Subliminal in all Romantic poetry's emphasis upon fragmentation, writes McFarland, is the question, how can a fragment be identified as a fragment unless there is also the conception of a whole from which it is broken off? . . . In truth, notwithstanding the massive testimony of the Romantic era to incompleteness, fragmentation, and ruin, that era was almost equally preoccupied with at least the idea of the whole. "The common end of all narrative" says Coleridge, "nay, oiall, Poems is to convert» series into a Whole."4 Eliot inherited the problem of making a long poem out of a sequence of shorter ones from his Romantic predecessors. And like Coleridge and Wordsworth, Eliot depended upon the idea of wholeness as much as the idea of fragmentation. McFarland also points out that more than the construction of poems depended upon this Romantic yearning for wholeness: not only poetic wholeness but metaphysical wholeness, "the sense of eternal power and of a divine spark," was inseparable "from incompleteness, fragmentation, and ruin." 5 The same

202

CHAPTER 10

can be said for Eliot. As he pushed himself beyond the limited strat­ egies of "The Death of the Duchess" and "Gerontion," his desire to compose a long poem became coequal with his yearning for "the whole truth." The search for poetic wholeness and metaphysical wholeness became one. In "Tradition and the Individual Talent" Eliot proposed to stop "at the frontier of metaphysics or mysticism" (SW, 59), but in composing The Waste Land he became a pilgrim in that uncharted territory. After The Waste Land was completed Eliot offered one much-abused key to the pattern of wholeness in the poem. In "Ulysses, Order, and Myth" he outlined the "mythical method" of Joyce's work, and his readers were quick to sense the importance of the method for The Waste Land: In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel be­ tween contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. They will not be im­ itators, any more than the scientist who uses the discoveries of an Einstein in pursuing his own, independent, further investigations. It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history. It is a method already adumbrated by Mr. Yeats, and of the need for which I believe Mr. Yeats to have been the first contemporary to be conscious. It is a method for which the horoscope is auspicious. Psychology (such as it is, and whether our reaction to it be comic or serious), ethnology, and The Golden Bough have concurred to make possible what was impossi­ ble even a few years ago. Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method. 6 This passage has encouraged, on the one hand, New Critical readings of The Waste Land that impose a spurious grail legend plot on the poem; on the other hand it has provoked readings that require us to read the "mythical method" as some kind of ironic deception.7 Neither of these views will do. The relationship οι "Ulysses, Order, and Myth" to The Waste Land is problematic. The essay is a part of

THE WASTE LAND

203

what Ronald Bush has called the "revised literary program" Eliot undertook after the completion of The Waste Land: "After many years of vacillating between a drive to represent his inner life and a drive to order it, he now was willing to let the balance tip toward the 'intellect' and toward 'classicism.' " 8 The "mythical method" had virtually nothing to do with the composition of Eliot's first long poem; rather, it represents his attempt to impose an order on a body of work that he desperately wanted to leave behind him. The "mythical method" has much more to do with the revised literary program of the 1926 Clark Lectures and The Hollow Men. To investigate the whole truth of The Waste Land we must turn to the concerns Eliot held during the actual gestation period of the poem. A fair place to begin, once again, is with Bradley. While Eliot's shorter poems are spoken by personae who cannot develop their perceptions of the world into a "system," The Waste Land is an attempt to present an interpretation of historical knowledge from a "systematic" point of view. Although he does not capitalize upon Eliot's use of the "systematic" nature of truth in his discussion of The Waste Land, Michael Levenson has shown how Eliot's emphasis upon the importance of transcending individual points of view for a vision of wholeness became one of the structural principles of the poem.9 In his dissertation, Eliot's discussion of transcendence emphasizes the irrationality and painfulness of the process: for the life of a soul does not consist in the contemplation of one consistent world but in the painful task of unifying (to a greater or less extent) jarring and incompatible ones, and passing, when possible, from two or more discordant viewpoints to a higher which shall somehow include and transmute them. (KE, 147-148) This passage is central to Eliot's critique of Bradley's concept of the Absolute (the ultimate synthesis of all diversity, difference, and contradiction). In "Leibniz' Monads and Bradley's Finite Centres," published in the Monist in 1916, Eliot points out that Bradley's Absolute "responds only to an imaginary demand of thought, and satisfies only an imaginary demand of feeling. Pretending to be something which makes finite centres cohere, it turns out to be merely the assertion that

204

CHAPTERlO

they do" (KE, 202). Instead of Bradley's Absolute, Eliot proposes his own theory of the unification of points of view: "if one recognizes two points of view which are quite irreconcilable and yet melt into each other, this theory [of the Absolute] is quite superfluous." In his dissertation Eliot was thinking along the same lines when he wrote that "the pre-established harmony [of the Absolute] is unnecessary if we recognize that the monads [of individual experience] are not wholly distinct" (KE, 206, 147). Because individual points of view are not completely distinct, the painful task of unification becomes possible without relying on the easy consolations of the Absolute. As Levenson points out, Eliot's note about Tiresias's function in The Waste Land echoes these passages from his philosophical writing about the possibility of transcending and combining individual points of view. Since all the personages of The Waste Land are "not wholly distinct" from each other, they "melt into" each other and converge in the presiding consciousness of Tiresias: Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a "character," is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest. Just as the one-eyed merchant, seller of currants, melts into the Phoenician Sailor, and the latter is not wholly distinct from Ferdinand of Naples, so all the women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias. (CPP, 52; my emphasis) Eliot employs the same phrase ("melts into") once again when he describes the unification of the two lovers in Romeo and Juliet: Shakespeare "shows his lovers melting into incoherent unconsciousness of their isolated selves, shows the human soul in the process of forgetting itself (SW, 83). This "painful task of unifying" builds bridges between individual consciousnesses as one mind "melts into" the other, overcoming the solipsistic condition of the finite center. It is important to see that this process of the unification of points of view is different from what Eliot's teacher, Josiah Royce, meant by the growth of a "Community of Interpretation." As we have seen, Royce stressed that in the formation of such a community, the interpreting mind and the interpreted mind "would remain distinct. . . . There would be no melting together, no blending, no mystic blur, and no

THE WASTE LAND

205

lapse into mere intuition." In contrast to Royce, Eliot insists that a "melting together" of minds is precisely what takes place. While Royce maintains that the "distinctions of the persons . . . is as essential to a Community of Interpretation as is the common task" in which these persons engage, Eliot presents a more overtly mystical theory of the way in which individuals come to understand one another.10 From Eliot's point of view, no real understanding takes place in Royce's "Community of Interpretation"; individuals must subject themselves to the painful task of melting into one another in order for a true unity to be achieved. This rationally inexplicable process of the combination of points of view is one way in which Eliot approaches "the whole truth" in The Waste Land. An earlier poem, "Dans Ie Restaurant," portrays this painful task of unification quite dramatically. A waiter approaches the speaker of the poem and tells him a sordid little story about a thwarted sexual experience he had as a child: Mais alors, vieux lubrique, a cet age . . . "Monsieur, Ie fait est dur. Il est venu, nous peloter, un gros chien; Moij'avais peur, je 1'ai quitee a mi-chemin. C'est dommage." Mais alors, tu as ton voutour! Va t'en te decrotter les rides du visage: Tiens, ma fourchette, decrasse-toi Ie crane. De quel droit payes-tu des experiences comme moi? Tiens, voila dix sous, pour la salle-de-bains. (CPP, 32) The speaker of the poem becomes outraged as he realizes that his own experiences are not unique; the tidy borders of his consciousness are threatened as the consciousness of the waiter "melts into" his own and the painful task of unifying begins. In the final stanza of the poem, which Eliot himself translated from the French to make the "Death by Water" lyric in The Waste Land, the speaker undergoes an even more dramatic transformation as he is metamorphosed into Phlebas the Phoenician. Slowly, this process of the unification of points of view

CHAPTER 10

206

builds from an individual consciousness to a universal mind that encompasses the whole truth. "Dans Ie Restaurant" was an important poem in Eliot's own transition from poems that present only a limited point of view to The Waste Land, the culmination of his attempt to formulate a "system." Throughout The Waste Land the process of transcending individual points of view—the creation of a "system"—becomes far more intricate: there, Phlebas the Phoenician from "Dans Ie Restaurant" melts into the one-eyed merchant and Ferdinand of Naples—and each of these personages is not wholly distinct from the presiding consciousness of Tiresias. Eliot also used allusions to enact this movement toward wholeness. In "A Note on Ezra Pound" he compared Pound's use of allusion with Joyce's, calling Joyce "another very learned literary artist, [who] uses allusions suddenly and with great speed, part of the effect being the extent of the vista opened to the imagination by the very lightest touch."11 This is the effect Eliot sought in his own use of allusion. "Cousin Nancy" begins as a satire of New England manners: Miss Nancy Ellicott Strode across the hills and broke them, Rode across the hills and broke them— The barren New England hills— Riding to hounds Over the cow-pasture. But the poem ends with an allusion to Meredith's "Lucifer in Starlight," which, as Eliot wrote of Joyce's allusions, occurs "suddenly and with great speed" and "by the very lightest touch" expands "the vista opened to the imagination": Upon the glazen shelves kept watch Matthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith, The army of unalterable law. (CPP, 17-18) "The army of unalterable law," a line taken from Meredith's poem about the fallen Lucifer's attempt to reclaim the heavens, expands the vista of "Cousin Nancy" by comparing Arnold and Emerson with Mil-

THE WASTE LAND

207

ton's God and the modern Cousin Nancy with the rebellious Satan. The final line of the poem enacts a sudden movement toward "the whole truth." The last stanza of "Sweeney Among the Nightingales" creates a similar effect: pivoting on the change in tense of the verb to "sing," these lines suddenly compare the degenerate Sweeney's predicament with Agamemnon's, radically expanding the historical significance of the poem: The host with someone indistinct Converses at the door apart, The nightingales are singing near The Convent of the Sacred Heart, And sang within the blood wood When Agamemnon cried aloud, And let their liquid siftings fall To stain the stiff dishonoured shroud. (CPP, 36) In The Waste Land Eliot employs allusions in the same way, adding reference to reference in order to build the most comprehensive point of view possible. The opening lines of "The Fire Sermon" are perhaps the most concentrated in the entire poem: The river's tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed. Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song. The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers, Silk handerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed. And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors; Departed, have left no addresses. By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept. . . Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song, Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long. But at my back in a cold blast I hear The rattle of bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.

208

CHAPTER 10

A rat crept softly through the vegetation Dragging its slimy belly on the bank While I was fishing in the dull canal On a winter evening round behind the gashouse Musing on the king my father's death before him. White bodies naked on the low damp ground And bones cast in a little low dry garret, Rattled by the rat's foot only, year to year. But at my back from time to time I hear The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring. O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter And her daughter They wash their feet in soda water Et O ces voix (Tenfants, chantant dans la coupolel (CPP, 42-43) While in "The Death of the Duchess" the speaker falls into the "trap of interpretation" because he cannot perceive The Duchess of Malfi within the context of a whole and coherent "system," these lines from The Waste Land reveal the construction of such a "system," building up a palimpsest of historical references to Spenser, Marvell, Shakespeare, Verlaine, and ancient vegetation rituals—all of which are synthesized into the reality of the present. Unlike "The Death of the Duchess" or "Gerontion," there is no evidence of a self-deceiving interpreter speaking these lines. The speakers of the shorter poems are content to remain locked in their limited interpretations of the world; they do not attempt the task of unifying. In The Waste Land, on the other hand, so many individual consciousnesses are unified that the voice intoning the poem often seems to be the voice of history itself, an expression of the "entire past" woven into the texture of the present. The voices in The Waste Land are thus both past and present, both personal and universal, both autobiographical and historical—distinctions that, like Dilthey, Eliot collapses. Dilthey writes that in autobiography "we approach the roots of all historical comprehension. . . . It alone makes historical insight possible."12 Eliot makes the same point in "Modern Tendencies in Poetry," an essay published a few

THEWASTELAND

209

months after "Tradition and the Individual Talent," which appears to be a casual rewriting of the more famous manifesto. In "Modern Tendencies in Poetry" Eliot writes much more clearly about the nature of personality in poetry, establishing that a lack of personality is as detrimental as an excess: a scientist "submerges himself in what he has to do, [and] forgets himself but in the work of a great scientist, there is still "a cachet of the man all over it." A strong sense of personality is just as important for the historian or the poet. Like Dilthey, Eliot insists that we cannot know the past except through our personal interests; if our personal present ceased to be important, the past would cease to exist. If you imagine yourselves suddenly deprived of your personal present, of all possibility of action, reduced in consciousness to the memories of everything up to the present, these memories, this existence which would be merely the totality of memories, would be meaningless and flat, even if H could continue to exist. If suddenly all power of producing more poetry were withdrawn from the race, if we knew that for poetry we should have to turn always to what already existed, I think that past poetry would become meaningless. For the capacity of appreciating poetry is inseparable from the power of producing it, it is poets themselves who can best appreciate poetry. Life is always turned toward creation; the present only, keeps the past alive.13 This dictum is embodied in The Waste Land, a poem both richly historical and painfully autobiographical. In the passage quoted above from "The Fire Sermon," some readers may combine the references to Spenser's "Prothalamion," Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" and the ballad of Mrs. Porter into a portrait of Eliot's sense of his own failed marriage; others may read these allusions as the attempt of the "constantly amalgamating" (SE, 247) mind to construct a city's history of isolation and betrayal. But neither of these readings cancels out the other. As Eliot's own historicism reveals, each reading makes the other possible. Autobiography and history are merged in the "painful task of unifying," and the poem expresses a point of view that is at

210

CHAPTER 10

once individual and capable of encompassing what Eliot thought of as the "entire past." In the final movement of The Waste Land, Eliot invokes the voice of the entire past even more successfully in the mystical rumblings of the thunder. "What the Thunder Said," in fact, is written in a style strikingly different from that of "The Fire Sermon" (though placed third in the sequence, "The Fire Sermon" was the first movement of the poem Eliot drafted while "What the Thunder Said" was the last).14 In the later stages of composition, Eliot became dissatisfied with the mosaic-like style he had perfected in "The Fire Sermon," and in the "water dripping song" he began to experiment with the freer, more incantatory style that would carry him through The HolhwMen to the Four Quartets. Eliot's comments on Pound's early Cantos suggest the reasons for his rejection of his own earlier style: when he compared Joyce's use of allusion with Pound's, he disparaged the "deliberateness" of Three Cantos, preferring Joyce's epiphanic effects to what amounted to a "rag-bag of Mr. Pound's reading in various languages."15 Eliot feared that his long poem would become the same thing—a "rag-bag" of fragments rather than a "system" that is somehow greater than the sum of its parts. He also realized that it was beyond the capability of a merely human consciousness to create this vision of wholeness. When Eliot criticized Bradley's solipsistic vision of experience, remarking that he divided human knowledge so resolutely into distinct finite centers that the world "is only by an act of faith unified" (KE, 202), he identified the very thing required to articulate a vision of "the whole truth." It is finally not rational process but an irrational faith in the possibility of wholeness that makes Eliot's world cohere. Eliot learned this lesson from Dante. In the final essay oiTheSacred Wood (a book that rests upon the "systematic" nature of truth in its judgments of both criticism and poetry) he presented thcDivine Comedy as the most comprehensive expression of a "system" ever attempted. The poem is an ordered scale of human emotions. Not, necessarily, all human emotions; and in any case all the emotions are limited, and also extended in significance by their place in the scheme.

THE WASTE LAND

211

But Dante's is the most comprehensive, and the most ordered presentation of emotions that has ever been made. (SW, 168) This description of the Divine Comedy reiterates the two essential ingredients of a "system": wholeness and coherence. At the end of the essay, Eliot states that there is one additional ingredient that makes Dante's "system" superior to that of any modern poet: the intensity and reality of its vision. When Eliot reshaped this essay on Dante for inclusion in The Sacred Wood, he added an introduction in which he quoted a paragraph from Paul Valery's introduction to Lucien Fabre's Connaissance de L· Deese (1920). Eliot was not familiar with Valery's entire essay, but he read an excerpt that was quoted in Charles du Bos's "Letters from Paris" in the Athenaeum.·}6 La philosophic, et meme la morale tendirent a fuir les oeuvres pour se placer dans les reflexions qui les precedent. . . . Parler aujourd'hui de poesie philosophique (fut-ce en invoquant Alfred de Vigney, Leconte de Lisle, et quelques autres), c'est naivement confondre des conditions et des applications de 1'esprit incompatibles entre elles. N'est-ce pas oublier que Ie but de celui qui specule est de fixer ou de creer une notion—c'est-a-dire un pouvoir et un instrument depouvoir, cependant que Ie poete moderne essaie de produire en nous un e'tat et de porter cet etat exceptionnel au point d'une jouissance parfaite. (SW, 159) Valery is a straw man in Eliot's argument. While making his respect for Valery's work clear, Eliot comments that "if Mr. Valery is in error in his complete exorcism of'philosophy,' perhaps the basis of the error is his apparently commendatory interpretation of the effort of the modern poet, namely, that the latter endeavours 'to produce in us a state' " (SW, 160). At the end of the essay, Eliot returns to Valery when he points out that the aim of Dante's poetry is not to produce a state in the reader but to "state a vision." That vision, insists Eliot, is something real, something seen by the poet: Dante helps us to provide a criticism of M. Valery's "modern poet" who attempts "to produce in us a state." A state, in itself, is nothing whatever.

CHAPTER 10

212

M. Valery's account is quite in harmony with pragmatic doc­ trine, and with the tendencies of such a work as William James's Varieties of Religious Experience. The mystical experience is sup­ posed to be valuable because it is a pleasant state of unique inten­ sity. But the true mystic is not satisfied merely by feeling, he must pretend at least that he sees, and the absorption into the divine is only the necessary, if paradoxical, limit of this contemplation. The poet does not aim to excite—that is not even a test of his success— but to set something down. (SW, 170) Eliot's invocation of theories of mysticism and vision should not be taken lightly here; between 1908 and 1914 he read extensively in mys­ tical literature and took copious notes from many books, including the chapter on "Mysticism" in James's Varieties of Religious Experience. Eliot associates James's psychological explanation of mystical states with Valery's theory of modern poetry; in contrast, he associates Dante's work with what he calls the "true mystic"—one who actually sees and records his vision. In Evelyn Underbill's Mysticism (1911), a book he read and annotated particularly closely, Eliot underlined this passage: Visionary experience is—or at least may be—the outward sign of a real experience. It is a picture which the mind constructs, it is true, from raw materials already at its disposal: as the artist constructs his picture with canvas and paint.17 This passage describes the orientation of the "true mystic," and it bears a significant resemblance to Pound's conception of visionary ex­ perience. In "Psychology and Troubadours" Pound wrote that the vi­ sions of true mystics are "for them real" (SR, 92). Eliot must have had Pound's ideas about mysticism in mind (in addition to Underbill's) when he rewrote his essay on Dante: when he quoted these lines from the first canto of the Paradiso as an example of Dante's visionary in­ tensity, NeI suo aspetto tal dentro mi fei, qual si fe Glauco nel gustar de 1'erba che Ί fe consorto in mar de Ii altri dei.

THEWASTELAND

213

[Gazing upon her I became within me such as Glaucus became on tasting of the grass that made him sea-fellow of the other gods] ,18 he added a footnote that reads "See E. Pound, The Spirit ofRomance" (SW, 169). In The Spirit of Romance Pound also quotes these lines about Glaucus's transformation and comments that "nowhere is the nature of the mystic ecstasy so well described" (SR, 141). By tasting the magical grass, Glaucus is transformed into a sea-creature; his visionary experience is tangible and real. Dante's power to perceive and transcribe visionary experience in concrete terms is what makes his "system," his "ordered presentation of emotions," so successful. Modern poets, says Eliot, have lost this ability, and as Valery suggests, strive instead to produce some sort of ill-defined state in the reader. Even when modern poets "confine themselves to what they had perceived," says Eliot, "they produce for us, usually, only odds and ends of still life and stage properties: but that does not imply so much that the method of Dante is obsolete, as that our vision is perhaps comparatively restricted." Dante's visionary capabilities are in no way restricted, and he is able to present a vision that is "nearly complete" (SW, 171,170). The visionary ability Eliot describes in this essay on Dante underlies a conception of myth that is far more important for The Waste Land than the one outlined in "Ulysses, Order, and Myth." While he was actually working on The Waste Land Eliot described myth in "The Romantic Englishman" (1921) as life seen "in the light of imagination": myth is "a point of view, transmuted to importance; it is made by the transformation of the actual by imaginative genius."19 This more supple conception of myth has much more to do with The Waste Land than any "continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity. " Eliot's approach to "the whole truth" depends—as he believed Dante's "system" of the Divine Comedy did—upon this ability to transform the actual into the mythical. Eliot's ambition was to be a poet such as Dante, of course, and not the type of the modern poet described by Valery or William James; and it is essential to recognize the role of transcendental vision in Eliot's presentation of a "system" in The Waste Land. While I have

214

CHAPTER 10

demonstrated how Tiresias functions in the poem to suggest a point of view that is constantly amalgamating limited points of view to approach a vision of wholeness, it is just as important to see that Tiresias functions as the "true mystic" Eliot describes in his essay on Dante. From the evidence oiThe Waste Land manuscript, it is clear that "The Fire Sermon" crystallized around these lines (ultimately deleted) that introduced the presiding consciousness of Tiresias. After a prophetic description of the inhabitants of London as "phantasmal gnomes" who know neither how to think nor how to feel, Tiresias is presented as one of the few human minds capable of sensing the meaning hidden in this meager existence. He sees these limited lives as part of a much larger whole: Some minds, aberrant from the normal equipoise (London, your people is bound upon the wheel!) Record the motions of these pavement toys And trace the cryptogram that may be curled Within these faint perceptions of the noise, Of the movement, and the lights! Not here, O Glaucon, but in another world. (WLF, 31) Pound persuaded Eliot to cut these lines, suggesting that the "phantasmal gnomes" reminded him of the benevolent elves of Palmer Cox's "Brownie" poems for children (WLF, 31, 127). The passage nevertheless reveals how Tiresias was to function not only as the "most important personage in the poem" but as an observing consciousness who can penetrate the everyday world of Sunday outings and closed carriages to "trace the cryptogram" of a higher reality— transforming that everyday reality into a visionary world of myth. Most of London's inhabitants, like the modern poets Eliot rejects in his essay on Dante, see nothing beyond "the normal equipoise." But there are a few who do not burrow "in brick and stone and steel" but are able to perceive their fragmentary, materialistic condition as part of a much larger whole. These few, like Dante, like Tiresias, can see into another world. Glaucon, invoked in the final line of this passage, is one of the speakers in Plato's Republic. When he asks Socrates if the

THE WASTE LAND

215

ideal city can be found on earth, Socrates replies, "perhaps there is a pattern of it laid up in heaven for him who wishes to contemplate it and so beholding to constitute himself its citizen" (WLF, 128). Only with this kind of visionary power can one transcend the "normal equipoise" and perceive the "systematic" interconnectedness of all things, earthly and ethereal, past and present. When Eliot defined myth as the product of "the transformation of the actual by imaginative genius," he was remembering his discussions of the hallucinatory consciousness in his dissertation: It is not true that the ideas of a great poet are in any sense arbitrary: certainly in the sense in which imagination is capricious, the ideas of a lunatic or an imbecile are more "imaginative" than those of a poet. In really great imaginative work the connections are felt to be bound by as logical necessity as any connections to be found anywhere; the apparent irrelevance is due to the fact that terms are used with more or other than their normal meaning, and to those who do not thoroughly penetrate their significance the relation between the aesthetic expansion and the objects expressed is not visible. (KE, 75) The truly imaginative work, says Eliot, is the result of penetrating the normal terms of reality to discover a deeper and consequently fantastic and often obscure meaning. In his 1919 essay on "Beyle and Balzac" he explains that the fantastical "aura" of many of Balzac's works was not the result of a truly imaginative consciousness; "it is an atmosphere thrown upon reality direct from the personality of the writer." Contrasting Balzac with Dostoevsky, Eliot explains that Dostoevsky's "most successful, most imaginative 'flights' " are projections, continuations, of the actual, the observed: the final scene of the "Idiot," the hallucinations at the beginning of the same book and in "Crime and Punishment," even (what is more questionable) the interview of Ivan Karamazov with the Devil—Dostoevsky's point of departure is always a human brain in a human environment, and the "aura" is simply the continuation of the quotidian experience of the brain into seldom explored extremities of

216

CHAPTER 10

torture. Because most people are too unconscious of their own suffering to suffer much, this continuation appears fantastic.20 To push "quotidian experience of the brain into seldom explored extremities of torture" was Eliot's goal in The Waste Land. Throughout the poem the gaze of Tiresias acts as a metaphor for the visionary gaze of the inspired poet, transforming reality into myth. The wellknown "Unreal City" passage enacts just the imaginative process Eliot admired in Dostoevsky. It begins by painting a scene that could be purely naturalistic: Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many. (CPP, 39) Only if the reader recognizes the reference to the third canto of the Inferno would he suspect that any other world but modern London were being invoked; Eliot even remarks in a note that this crowd crossing London Bridge is a "phenomenon which I have often noticed" (CPP, 51). The lines that follow are scrupulously accurate in their depiction of London's geography (were London Bridge still in place one could cross it and pass St. Mary Woolnoth at the corner of King William and Lombard Streets); at the same time the lines begin to invoke another world: Sighs, short and infrequent were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet. Flowed up the hill and down King William Street To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine. (CPP, 39) Yet even when the ghostly Stetson appears, the scene continues to be depicted in purely naturalistic terms. With the word "Mylae," a battle in the Punic Wars, we suspect that we have entered a different level of reality—one in which the boundaries between the past and the present have been severed. The corpse that has been planted in the garden in place of the expected seed or bulb confirms the suspicion. By the end of the passage we are deep inside the "seldom explored extremities of torture" of the mind:

THE WASTE LAND

217

There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying "Stetson! "You who were with me in the ships at Mylae! "That corpse you planted last year in your garden, "Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? "Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed? "Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men, "Or with his nails he'll dig it up again! "You! Hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frere!" (CPP, 39) This is, as the speaker of the opening passages of the poem promised he would show, "something different from either/Your shadow at morning striding behind you I Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you" (CPP, 38). Yet the ghostly Stetson remains closely linked to the reality of everyday London. Like the ghosts of Pound's Three Cantos Stetson is a ghost "patched with histories." He is simultaneously a fourteenth-century Florentine condemned to limbo in Dante's hell, a third-century B.C. Greek who fought at Mylae, one of the "spectres" of Baudelaire's "Les Sept VielIards" who "en plein jour raccroche Ie passant!" [in broad daylight accosts the passer-by], and a soldier who witnessed the crucifixion at the final stroke of nine. And while the multiple allusions in the passage establish Stetson's historical identities, he is simultaneously a modern Londoner, a soldier who has returned from the Great War— the event that turned Europe into a wasted landscape of corpses and ghosts. These lines are the equivalent in Eliot's work to Pater's La Gioconda or Yeats's "The Secret Rose"; they incorporate the "entire" past into an intense consciousness of the present. Eliot had little faith in the individual's ability to achieve this kind of transcendent vision of "the whole truth" on his own. Most people are restricted to the narrow vision of "Gerontion," and their understanding of history is consequently limited, their ability to interpret restricted to their knowledge of their own consciousness. Only the inspired interpreter (such as Dante or Tiresias) can attain a vision of "the whole truth" and escape the inevitable "trap of interpretation." While Eliot recognized that any statement about the world is neces-

218

CHAPTER 10

sarily an imperfect interpretation, he nevertheless confessed in less guarded moments that he felt himself able to transcend those limitations and feel the presence of the past with visionary intensity. In the fourth segment of "Reflections on Contemporary Poetry" (1919) he explained this mystical ability to know the past: the poet's ultimate experience is to possess this secret knowledge, this intimacy, with the dead man, that after few or many years or centuries you should have appeared, with this indubitable claim to distinction; who can penetrate at once the thick and dusty circumlocutions about his reputation, can call yourself alone his friend. . . . We may not be great lovers; but if we had a genuine affair with a real poet of any degree we have acquired a monitor to avert us when we are not in love. Indirectly, there are other acquisitions: our friendship gives us an introduction to the society in which our friend moved; we learn its origins and its endings; we are broadened. We do not imitate, we are changed; and our work is the work of the changed man; we have not borrowed, we have been quickened, and we become bearers of a tradition.21 When Eliot suggests that an actor should transmit rather than interpret his lines, he has this visionary sense of the past in mind. A poet may know "the origins and endings" of the past if he is able to transcend the limitations of rational interpretation. For Eliot, the creation of a "systematic" point of view depends on this ability. Like Pound, Eliot alternated between a wildly poetic sense of the past and a sternly skeptical critique of historical knowledge. And because his skepticism was more rigorous than Pound's, his infrequent eruptions of visionary fervor appear all the more outrageous. Once we understand this tension in Eliot's work, the often contradictory comments Eliot offers about the nature of interpretation throughout his entire career become far more explicable. We have seen that in his dissertation (1916) Eliot writes that any "assertion about the world. . . will inevitably be an interpretation" (KE, 165). Yet in his 1919 review oflhe Duchess ofMalfi he maintains that "there is no such thing as the interpretation of poetry; poetry can only be transmitted."22 This same

THE WASTE LAND

219

contradiction is evident in his critical writings from the 1930s. In a 1936 lecture on Yeats the skeptical Eliot says that "a 'perfect understanding' of a foreign literature or of an earlier period of our own, is an unattainable ideal: sometimes the way in which it is raw-understood is the important thing."23 Yet in his introduction to G. Wilson Knight's The Wheel of Fire (1930) Eliot maintains that a reader of poetry should avoid interpretation and "limit his criticism of poetry to the appreciation of vocabulary and syntax, the analysis of line, metric and cadence; to stick as closely to the more trustworthy senses as possible."24 Here Eliot's circumvention of the "trap of interpretation" sounds more like a phenomenological reduction than a visionary sense of the past, yet the mysticism inherent in this position becomes clearer later in the essay. Eliot admits that a "restless demon in us drives us also to 'interpret' whether we will or not" but then cautions that "if one was as great a poet as Shakespeare, and was also his 'spiritual heir,' one would feel no need to interpret him; interpretation is necessary perhaps only in so far as one is passive, not creative, oneself."25 Here Eliot reveals the same faith in a rationally inexplicable immediacy between two authors that he exhibited in his 1919 essay on contemporary poetry. In the dull rounds of everyday life, interpretation and its imperfections are inevitable. But if a poet discovers himself to be the "spiritual heir" of a dead poet, the intervening centuries fall away and (as Eliot phrased it in 1919) he achieves an "intimacy with the dead man" and becomes a "bearer of a tradition." He does not interpret but lives the past. In "Thinking in Verse: A Survey of SeventeenthCentury Poetry" (1930) Eliot even suggested that a historian could adopt the method of mystical meditation and become "so steeped in Greek history as to see Thermopylae as he has seen events in his own life."26 The speaker of "Gerontion" does not have this power; he was not at the "hot gates" (Eliot's literal translation of "Thermopylae"). The visionary consciousness of The Waste Land, on the other hand, meets with the soldiers from the ships at Mylae as he meets the common pedestrian. He has had the "genuine affair" with the past; he has glimpsed the "whole truth." More often than not, these transcendent

220

CHAPTER 10

moments remained part of a buried life that the skeptical Eliot only hinted at in public. Today, this Romantic ideal of transcending the vagaries of interpretation for an immediate experience of the past seems alien to us, but Eliot was not alone in expressing his desire to do so. In the nineteenth century Schleiermacher maintained that the "divinatory [method of hermeneutics] is that in which one transforms oneself into the other person in order to grasp his individuality directly." Schleiermacher emphasized this divinatory method more and more in his later work, yet like Eliot, he vacillated between this transcendental impulse and a more skeptical critique of understanding. Paul Ricoeur has noticed that this tension marks the entire history of hermeneutic thought: Schleiermacher's hermeneutical programme thus carried a double mark: Romantic by its appeal to a living relation with the process of creation, critical by its wish to elaborate the universally valid rules of understanding. Perhaps hermeneutics is forever marked by this double filiation—Romantic and critical, critical and Romantic. The proposal to struggle against misunderstanding in the name of the famous adage "there is hermeneutics where there is misunderstanding" is critical; the proposal "to understanding an author as well as and even better than he understands himself is Romantic.27 We can see how Eliot's desire for a mystical knowledge of the past places him in a Romantic tradition, and occasionally Eliot made statements that reveal that he sensed this himself. In 1916 he reviewed John Theodore Merz's Religion and Science for the International Journal ofEthics, and in 1918 he reviewed it again for the Monist. The two reviews are nearly identical, but in the Monist Eliot adds a new paragraph in which he states that "Mr. Merz knows his Schleiermacher" and an even more telling concluding sentence: "The account of description, explanation, and interpretation is the best part of the book."28 Turning to Merz's account of interpretation, it is easy to see what Eliot found so attractive. Like Eliot, Merz believed that the only truth is the "whole truth": "Every description or explanation re-

THE WASTE LAND

221

mains, however, incomplete; to become complete it should really comprise the whole universe, allotting to every special thing or event its exact location in space and time." For Merz as for Eliot, interpretation may only approach truth by expanding its point of view to encompass a coherent "system." And like Eliot, Merz believed that such "completeness is unattainable to the human mind." There is one way, however, in which Merz thought the human mind might grasp the "whole truth": The manifold features of existence, the endless variety of colour, shape, sound, in their never-ending change, must in some way or other "contract into a span," so that they may be grasped by the human eye or the human intellect; and this contracted image or symbol must give the impression of completeness, of indicating, suggesting, or embracing a totality: in the highest sense the totality of everything—the Universe, the All. The human mind possesses two very different means of achieving this. The first is abstract thought, the second the creation of the artist.29 This is precisely the power that Eliot attributed to Dante, the "true mystic." While Eliot thought that Bradley's skepticism denied him the consolations of the Absolute, he found that this unified whole could be made available by the visionary artist (Dante, Tiresias, Eliot himself) who presents the image of "the totality of everything—the Universe, the All" in his art. An account of the visionary powers Eliot perceived in Dante and attempted to locate in Tiresias's consciousness in The Waste Land is lacking from his description of the ideal poet in "Tradition and the Individual Talent." These powers lay beyond the "frontier of metaphysics or mysticism," and Eliot's description of the "system" of tradition relies on the more explicable process of the unification of points of view: one's knowledge of the "whole truth" of "the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer" is built up slowly, piece by piece, with "great labour" (SW, 49). By the time Eliot wrote "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919) he had been discussing the importance of tradition (especially

222

CHAPTER 10

in connection with Pound's work) for several years. His first extended explanation of tradition came in the third installment of "Reflections on Contemporary Poetry," published two years before his most famous essay: Each of us, even the most gifted, can find room in his brain for hardly more than two or three new ideas, or ideas so perfectly assimilated as to be original; for an idea is a speciality, and no one has time for more than a few. With these, or with one, say, hexagonal or octagonal idea, each sets to work and industriously and obliviously begins building cells; not rebelling against the square or the circle, but occasionally coming into collision with some other Bee which has rectangular or circular ideas. All the ideas, beliefs, modes of feeling and behaviour which we have not time or inclination to investigate for ourselves we take second-hand and sometimes call Tradition. This paragraph provides a neat metaphorical description of the process of the unification of points of view, the building of a "system" out of inherited and acquired bits of knowledge. At the end of this paragraph, however, Eliot adds a curious footnote: For an authoritative condemnation of theories attaching extreme importance to tradition as a criterion of truth, see Pope Gregory XVI's encyclical Singuhri nos (July 15, 1834), and the Vatican Council canon of 1870, Si quis dixerit. . . anathema sit.30 The influence of Pound, Bradley, and Dante on Eliot's conception of tradition is predictable enough, but this rather cryptic note seems to imply that Eliot's theory owes something to rather more esoteric—if more orthodox—sources. This footnote, in fact, is a cryptogram to Eliot's journey beyond the frontier of metaphysics or mysticism, and it is possible to follow that journey step by step. Eliot's conversion to the Anglican church did not occur until 1927, but as Lyndall Gordon has shown, Eliot was attracted to the church for many years and came close to conversion in 1916. He was, as he wrote of himself in "Eeldrop and Appleplex," enormously learned in theology ("a sceptic with a taste for mysticism"), and between 1916 and

THE WASTE LAND

223

1919, when he reviewed extensively for the International Journal of Ethics, almost all his reviews were of books on scholastic philosophy. The reading list for his 1916 extension lecture on "The Return to the Catholic Church" reveals an even more widely ranging knowledge of contemporary theology.31 Despite this background knowledge, however, Eliot's reference in "Reflections on Contemporary Poetry" to obscure texts of Catholic theology, the Singuhri nos of Gregory XVI and the papal canons issued by the first Vatican council, have an aura of "bogus scholarship"—the phrase he used to describe the notes to The Waste Land (OPP, 121). The Singuhri nos, for instance, has never been translated into English in its entirety, and it is difficult to believe that Eliot would have read it. Both of the texts to which Eliot refers are indeed authoritative condemnations "of theories attaching extreme importance to tradition as a criterion for truth," but they condemn a special conception of tradition. In Catholic theology "traditionalism" refers very specifically to a heretical philosophy developed by Louis de Bonald (1754—1840) and popularized throughout the nineteenth century. Eliot was not only familiar with the philosophy of "traditionalism," but his references to the church's condemnations of its doctrines are lifted from the works of scholastic theology he was reviewing for the International Journal ofEthics. A month before the third segment of "Reflections on Contemporary Poetry" appeared in thtEgoist, Eliot reviewed the first volume of Cardinal Mercier's Manual of Modern Scholastic Philosophy for the International Journal of Ethics. In this review he remarked that "no student of contemporary philosophy can afford to neglect the neo-scholastic movement since 1879."32 Neither could a student of "traditionalism" afford to neglect Cardinal Mercier's Manual ofModern Scholastic Philosophy. A succinct account of the philosophy appears in the chapter on "criteriology," the study of various criteria for truth: Traditionalism.—The most well-known representatives of this system, de Bonald and La Mennais, in order the better to refute the arguments of rationalism against religion, laid down the principle that the human reason is incapable by itself of attaining to a certain

224

CHAPTERlO

knowledge in matters metaphysical, religious or moral. They maintained that these truths must have been originally revealed by God to humanity, and that this primitive revelation has been handed down by tradition either through social teaching (so de Bonald) or by the general reason that is the basis of the beliefs admitted by all mankind (so La Mennais). The last motive of certitude in these matters is thus an act of faith in divine revelation. Indeed if we follow the general implication of the arguments brought forward by the traditionalists we find that in its last analysis all certitude rests on an act of faith?3 This is a fair and accurate account of "traditionalism." Faced with the sordid conclusions of the French Revolution, de Bonald set out in his La tegislation primitive (1802) and his Recherches phi losophiques sur les premiers objects de nos connaissances moraks (1818) to build a philosophy that would not rely upon human reason; the errors of human reason had poisoned the ideals of the revolution and caused the political and social chaos surrounding him. Directing his argument against Rousseau (a strategy that would have pleased any pupil of Irving Babbitt), de Bonald maintained that the individual is not capable of determining truth on his own. Truth is available only as a revelation from God. These revelations were made available to primitive man and have been transmitted to modern times by the process of tradition. According to "traditionalist" doctrine, as Mercier states, all certitude rests "on an act of faith" and on the maintenance of the knowledge derived from this primitive act of faith by the process of tradition. Neither of the Papal condemnations of "traditionalism" that Eliot cites in his footnote are mentioned in Mercier's Manual of Modern Scholastic Philosophy, but the Si quis dixerit is cited in another book Eliot reviewed at around the same time: Peter Coffey's Epistemology (1917). In the first volume of this treatise, Coffey offers a brief sketch of "traditionalism": for some people, truth is "above the power of the human mind to have discovered without revelation," and their assent to these truths is "an assent of Faith in the strictest sense." In opposition to this doctrine Coffey cites the Vatican Council canon, Si quis dixerit:

THE WASTE LAND

225

The Vatican Council defined that the existence of God can be knownfor certain from the facts of experience by the natural light of human reason: "Si quis dixerit Deum unum ac verum, Creatorum ac Dominum nostrum, per ea quae facta sunt naturali rationis humanae lumine certo cognosci nos posse, anathema sit.34 The text of this canon, which Coffey does not translate, means: "If anyone says that the one true God, our Creator and Lord, cannot be shown with certainty by the natural light of human reason by means of the things that are made, let him be anathema."35 This statement, says Coffey, "condemns the view that this evidence [the facts of experience] is of itself, and without such supernatural aid as that of revelation, insufficient to exclude reasonable doubt and so produce certain knowledge."36 Since Eliot refers to the Si quis dixerit as a condemnation of his own theory of tradition, it seems logical that he knew—however much he hesitated to admit it—that his own theory was based upon the importance of supernatural aid. Even the inspired poet would have difficulty attaining a knowledge of "the whole truth" on his own. As we have seen, Eliot was dissatisfied with Bradley's account of the Absolute because it "responds only to an imaginary demand of thought, and satisfies only an imaginary demand of feeling. Pretending to be something which makes finite centres cohere, it turns out to be merely the assertion that they do" (KE, 202). Because Bradley locked the individual so securely in his "finite center" or point of view, Eliot found his leap to the whole truth untenable. "Bradley's universe," he wrote in "Leibniz' Monads and Bradley's Finite Centres," while "actual only in finite centres, is only by an act of faith unified" (KE, 202). Given Bradley's rigorous skepticism, this act of faith is not possible. But in the philosophy of "traditionalism," where all certitude rests upon an act of faith, the idea of the Absolute becomes tenable. For Eliot, Bradley's philosophy led "to something which, according to your temperament, will be resignation or despair."37 In "traditionalism," which takes the responsibility for enacting "the painful task of unifying" away from the individual by offering divine assistance, the whole truth becomes available once more. Comparing Leibniz' monads to Bradley's finite centers, Eliot

226

CHAPTER 10

commented that in Bradley's work (despite the rigorous skepticism) he was "not sure that the ultimate puzzle is any more frankly faced, or that divine intervention plays any smaller part" (KE, 207). Divine intervention plays no smaller part in Eliot's own theories of tradition and the unification of points of view. The Latin texts that Eliot cites in his footnote in "Reflections on Contemporary Poetry" are condemnations of an excessive dependence upon supernatural aid: by citing them as a condemnation of his own theory, Eliot pointed the way toward "the frontier of metaphysics or mysticism." He crossed that frontier most daringly in "What the Thunder Said," the final movement of The Waste Land. In this part of the poem, the doctrine of divine revelation, which is central to "traditionalism," provided him with another way of approaching the whole truth. Eliot himself felt that the new incantatory voice of "What the Thunder Said" came from some place beyond the parameters of his own mind. In his essay on "The 'Pensees' of Pascal" (1931), Eliot ventured a description of mystical experience that he later confessed was derived from his own experience of writing the last movement of The Waste Land: What can only be called mystical experience happens to many men who do not become mystics. . . . it is a commonplace that some forms of illness are extremely favorable, not only to religious illumination, but to artistic and literary composition. A piece of writing meditated, apparently without progress, for months or years, may suddenly take shape and word; and in this state long passages may be produced which require little or no retouch. . . . You may call it communion with the Divine, or you may call it a temporary crystalization of mind. (SE, 357-358) While Eliot felt that the writing of "What the Thunder Said" involved some sort of mystical experience, the process of revelation plays an even more important part in the very structure of this part of The Waste Land. Eliot wrote to Bertrand Russell that "What the Thunder Said" is "not only the best part [oiThe Waste Land], but the only part that justifies the whole, at all" (WLF, 129). The "whole" was just what Eliot was after in "What the Thunder Said"—not only for-

THE WASTE LAND

227

mally, as a satisfying conclusion to a long poem, but also ideologically, as an expression of spiritual wholeness. In the "fable of the meaning of the Thunder" (CPP, 54), as he calls it in his notes, Eliot shows how a primitive revelation of "the whole truth" (the thunderous "DA") is disseminated, by the process of tradition, throughout history. As Eliot presents it, this process bears a significant resemblance to de Bonald's "traditionalism." In his discussion of'"traditionalism" in A Manual of Modern Scholastic Philosophy Mercier explains how de Bonald believed that language itself is based upon the reality of divine revelation: The necessity of an initial revelation, according to de Bonald, is based on the fact of language. He argues thus:—Man possesses language. But man could not have invented it; for to do so the power of thought is necessary, and man is incapable of thinking without inwardly formulating words, according to the celebrated dictum of Rousseau: "Man must think his word before he can speak his thought." Therefore to invent language man must first have been in possession of words—which is self-contradictory. He concludes, then, that man received language from without, and this he could have done only from God. Hence did human reason commence to think only by an act of faith in the divine word which revealed at once both language and its meaning. And consequently, every certain assent of the mind must rest ultimately on an act of faith in a primitive revelation.38 According to de Bonald's reasoning, man could not have invented language because language is anterior to thought and at the same time thought is necessary to formulate language. The only way out of this closed circle is to postulate the theory of the divine origins of language.39 The primitive revelation, incarnate in language, is disseminated through time by the process of "social teaching" and by the continuities of language itself. These mechanisms of tradition make divine knowledge available in the present—providing that faith and divine favor are maintained. Without this supernatural aid, history becomes the story of mankind's corruption and decline. Throughout the nineteenth century de Bonald's theory of the di-

228

CHAPTER 10

vine origins of language remained important for thinkers who opposed Darwin's theory of evolution and Robert Chambers's hotly disputed hypothesis (put forth in Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation [1844]) that animals possessed a primitive kind of sign language that was refined by human beings. Conservative thinkers such as Max Miiller and Julius Charles Hare used de Bonald's languageorigin theory to undermine these materialistic accounts of man's progress and to emphasize the necessity of a divine presence in the world.40 Eliot was attracted to the theory for much the same reason. As Ronald Schuchard has demonstrated, Eliot had by 1916 already begun to oppose the scientific skepticism of his age by formulating a theological world-view based upon the Hulmian doctrine of original sin.41 "Traditionalism" provided him with an alternative to the decidedly antimystical doctrine of Unitarianism, the religion in which he was raised; he grew dissatisfied with the intellectual and puritanical rationalism of Unitarianism, becoming convinced of the necessity of revelation.42 And while Hugh Kenner has suggested that Eliot's use of the "fable of the meaning of the Thunder" in The Waste Land owes something to Romantic theories of the origin of language and "invokes some two centuries' philological effort to recover the deepest memories of the tribe,"43 Eliot's attraction to "traditionalism" reveals the Romantic origins of his art even more clearly. In his notes to The Waste Land Eliot explains that 'Datta, dayadhvam, damyata" means "Give, sympathize, control" and that this "fable of the meaning of the Thunder is found in the BrihadaranyakaUpanishad" (CPP, 54). He then directs the reader to Paul Duessen's German translation of the Upanishad; but Eliot probably first read the parable in an English translation by his Harvard Sanskrit professor, Charles Lanman: Three kinds of children of Praja-pati, Lord of Children, lived as Brahman-students with Praja-pati their father: the gods, human beings, the demons.—Living with him as Brahman-students, the gods spake, "Teach us, Exalted One."—Unto them he spake this one syllable Da. "Have ye understood?"—"We have understood,"

THE WASTE LAND

229

thus they spake, "it was damyata, control yourselves, that thou saidest unto us."—"Yes," spake he, "ye have understood." Then spake to him human beings, "Teach us, Exalted One."— Unto them he spake that selfsame syllable Da. "Have ye understood?"—"We have understood," thus they spake, "it was datta, give, that thou saidest unto us."—"Yes," spake he, "ye have understood." Then spake to him the demons, "Teach us, Exalted One."— Unto them he spake that selfsame syllable Da. "Have ye understood?"—"We have understood," thus they spake, "it was dayadhvam, be compassionate, that thou saidest unto us."—"Yes," spake he, "ye have understood." This it is which that voice of god repeats, the thunder, when it rolls "Da Da Da," that is damyata datta dayadhvam. Therefore these three must be learned, self-control, giving, compassion. Lanman remarked of this passage, "a bit of the oldest Indo-European narrative prose," that it "gives to some of the cardinal virtues the sanction of divine revelation."44 As in de Bonald's "traditionalist" theory of the origin of language, the divine revelation of knowledge is revealed in the gift of language ("DA"), and its meaning is then disseminated by the process of social teaching. Although divine knowledge is interpreted differently by different peoples, it nevertheless remains absolutely true. The "trap of interpretation" has been avoided. This crossing of the "traditionalist" theory of the origin of language with Indian wisdom literature is not haphazard. Beginning with Herder's Ueber den Ursprung der Sprache (1772) the idea of India as the cradle of all human knowledge and of Sanskrit as the origin of all human languages became a commonplace in Romantic philology. In Ueber die Sprache und Weisheit derIndier (1808), perhaps the most influential text for the development of Sanskrit studies in the nineteenth century, Friedrich von Schlegel calls Sanskrit the Ursprache, the common source of all languages; he intimates that its origins are divine: "the Indian is almost entirely a philosophical or rather a religious language. . . . it has no variable or arbitrary combination of abstractions, but is formed on a permanent system, in which the deep symbolic sig-

230

CHAPTER 10

nification of words and expressions reciprocally explain, elucidate, and support each other."45 Eliot's use of the parable of the thunder in The Waste Land shows a clear affinity with this Romantic tradition of Sanskrit philology. The thunder's utterance of the syllable "DA" is the closest that Eliot comes to an expression of "the whole truth." It is the moment of primitive revelation on which de Bonald believed all certitude rests; it is the origin of language and tradition. As the Sanskrit fable of the thunder suggests, Eliot believed that this primitive knowledge was not available to modern man in its original form; as it is passed on to different peoples, the expression of divine wisdom necessarily changes. In "The Beating of a Drum" (1923), a review of W.O.E. Oesterley's The Sacred Dance, Eliot criticizes Oesterley for "formulating intelligible reasons for the primitive dancer's dancing." Like Pound and Yeats, Eliot faced the problem of an "irrevocable past" and suggested that meaning necessarily changes over time because of the process of interpretation: An unoccupied person, finding a drum, may be seized with a desire to beat it; but unless he is an imbecile he will be unable to continue beating it, and thereby satisfying a need (rather than a "desire"), without finding a reason for so doing. The reason may be the long continued drought. The next generation or the next civilization will find a more plausible reason for beating a drum. Shakespeare and Racine—or rather the developments which led up to them—each found his own reason. The reasons may be divided into tragedy and comedy. We still have similar reasons, but we have lost the drum.46 Eliot believed that the artist must keep in touch with these primitive energies, but he knew that the very process of tradition by which they come down to us distorts their original meaning. In his review of Wyndham Lewis's Tarr (1918) he wrote that "the artist . . . is more primitive, as well as more civilized, than his contemporaries, his experience is deeper than civilization, and he only uses the phenomena of civilization in expressing it. Primitive instincts and the acquired habits of ages are confounded in the ordinary man. In the work of Mr. Lewis we recognize the thought of the cave-man."47 While Lewis is in

THE WASTE LAND

231

touch with primitive energies, he cannot present primitive man in his original state; Tarr reveals the shape these energies take in the twentieth century. A year after his review of Tarr Eliot remembered the qualities he admired in Lewis, combined them with his admiration for Pound's wide-ranging knowledge, Bradley's emphasis on the "systematic" point of view, and de Bonald's "traditionalist" theory of primitive revelation, and presented a refined program for poetry: The maxim, Return to the sources, is a good one. More intelligibly put, it is that the poet should know everything that has been accomplished in poetry (accomplished, not merely produced) since its beginnings—in order to know what he is doing himself. He should be aware of all the metamorphoses of poetry that illustrate the stratifications of history that cover savagery.48 I have already quoted this passage from Eliot's review of an anthology of North American Indian songs and chants to illustrate the "stratifications of history" he builds up in the opening of "The Fire Sermon" or the "Unreal City" passage in "The Burial of the Dead."Juxtaposed with Eliot's interest in "traditionalism" and his use of the fable of the thunder in "What the Thunder Said," the significance of Eliot's desire to present "the stratifications of history that cover savagery" becomes even clearer: The jungle crouched, humped in silence. Then spoke the thunder DA Datta: what have we given? My friend, blood shaking my heart The awful daring of a moment's surrender Which an age of prudence can never retract By this, and this only, we have existed Which is not to be found in our obituaries Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor In our empty rooms

232

CHAPTER 10

DA Dayadhvam: I have heard the key Turn in the door once and turn once only We think of the key, each in his prison Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison Only at nightfall, aethereal rumours Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus DA Damyata: The boat responded Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar The sea was calm, your heart would have responded Gaily, when invited, beating obedient To controlling hands. (CPP, 49-50) These lines are usually read as an expression of Eliot's perception of the reduction of possibilities in his modern world; within the prison of consciousness, man does not seem capable of giving or sympathizing. The only rays of hope shine through the gloom in the "awful daring of the moment's surrender" (which makes giving seem as horrible as not giving) and "your heart [which] would have responded/Gaily, when invited, beating obedient/To controlling hands" (though this is no more than a supposition). While these lines express a vision of man's solipsistic existence, however, the structure of the passage undermines that vision. Even as Eliot writes that every person "in his prison I Thinking of the key, . . . confirms a prison," and quotes Bradley to support this description of the prison-house of consciousness, the structure of the passages shows (just as Bradley wanted to show) that each of us can transcend that limited consciousness. (Eliot's citation of Bradley at this point, in fact, has always seemed problematic because it ignores the central thrust of his philosophy: the necessity of transcending individual consciousnesses for the condition of the Absolute.)49 Based on the fable of the thunder in which sacred knowledge is interpreted in three different ways, this passage reveals the process of tradition operating successfully. The continuities of past and present, heaven and earth, are demonstrated in the act of interpretation. From "DA," the moment of what de Bonald would have called primitive revelation, through the three Sanskrit

THE WASTE LAND

233

interpretations of these words, the passage affirms historical continuity; it illustrates what Eliot called "the stratifications of history that cover savagery." At the end of the poem, the proliferation of tongues, the fragments shored against ruin, must be seen as emanating from the thunderous "DA." Fragments they are, but fragments with a common origin, fragments within a tradition that begins with a moment of revelation. Eliot's emphasis of historical continuity in The Waste Land reveals the positive side of a poem rooted in psychological and cultural disarray. When he added the notes to the poem, however, Eliot pointed out that one of the three themes of "What the Thunder Said" is "the present decay of eastern Europe" (CPP, 53). Like his account of the "mythical method," this retrospective comment has helped to lead more than one generation of readers to perceive the poem as a statement of cultural despair. Yet the provenience of that remark can help us to see that Eliot's attitude toward history was far more ambiguous. In a note to lines that introduce the voice of the thunder and harken back to the "Unreal City" passage in "The Burial of the Dead," Eliot directs his readers to a few sentences from Hermann Hesse'sBlick ins Chaos. Although he quotes from the original German, Eliot almost certainly first encountered these sentences in English when a translation of one of the essays in Hesse's book ("Die Briider Karamasoff oder der Untergang Europas"—"The Brothers Karamazov—The Downfall of Europe") was published in the July 1922 issue of the Dial. It is easy to see why Eliot found Hesse's discussion of Dostoevsky so attractive. Hesse's treatment of the visionary consciousness in The Brothers Karamazov is quite similar to Eliot's own treatment of the topic in his essay on "Beyle and Balzac" (1919). And in the following paragraph (which ends with the three sentences Eliot quotes in German in the notes to The Waste Land) Hesse offers a perfect description of the dilapidated yet visionary state of mind in which Eliot admitted he had written "What the Thunder Said": I said Dostoevsky is not a poet, or he is only a poet in a secondary sense. I called him a prophet. It is difficult to say exactly what a prophet means. It seems to me something like this. A prophet is a

234

CHAPTER 10

sick man, like Dostoevsky, who was an epileptic. A prophet is the sort of sick man who has lost the sound sense of taking care of himself, the sense which is the saving of the efficient citizen. It would not do if there were many such, for the world would go to pieces. This sort of sick man, be he called Dostoevsky or Karamazov, has that strange, occult, godlike faculty, the possibility of which the Asiatic venerates in every maniac. He is a seer and an oracle. A people, a period, a country, a continent has fashioned out of its corpus an organ, a sensory instrument of infinite sensitiveness, a very rare and delicate organ. . . . Every man has visions, every man has fantasies, every man has dreams. And every vision, every dream, every idea and thought of a man, on the road from the unconscious to the conscious, can have a thousand different meanings, of which every one can be right. But the appearances and visions of the seer and the prophet are not his own. The nightmare of visions which oppresses him does not warn him of a personal illness, of a personal death, but of the illness, the death of that corpus whose sensory organ he is. This corpus can be a family, a clan, a people, or it can be all mankind. In the soul of Dostoevsky a certain sickness and sensitiveness to suffering in the bosom of mankind which is otherwise called hysteria, found at once its means of expression and its barometer. Mankind is now on the point of realizing this. Already half Europe, at all events half Eastern Europe, is on the road to Chaos. In a state of drunken illusion she is reeling into the abyss and, as she reels, she sings a drunken hymn such as Dmitri Karamazov sang. The insulted citizen laughs that song to scorn, the saint and seer hear it with tears. When Eliot returned to London from his treatment with Dr. Vittoz in Lausanne, he read this paragraph and saw a correlative for his own experience of finishing The Waste Land. He too had been the victim of an illness that gave him "that strange, occult, godlike faculty" to intuit a continent's "nightmare of visions." Hesse wrote that in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov "the unconscious of a whole continent and age has made of itself poetry in the nightmare of a single, prophetic dreamer," and concluded that no other work "has ever set

THE WASTE LAND

235

forth with more lucid clearness the communication of a human being with his own unconscious self."50 No work, we might add, until The Waste Land, Eliot's deepest descent into "the poet's inner world of nightmare" (SE, 166). When Hesse wrote that Dostoevsky depicted Europe "on the road to chaos," he meant something far more complicated than this simply pessimistic line implies. In fact, he believed that this movement toward chaos "discloses the rich possibilities of the New Life." This downfall is a return home to the mother, a turning back to Asia, to the source, to the "Faiistischen Muttern" and will necessarily lead, like every death on earth, to a new birth. We contemporaries see a "downfall" in these events in the same way as the aged who, compelled to leave the home they love, mourn a loss to them irreparable while the young think only of the future, care only for what is new. These sentences provide a worthy description of the sensibility Eliot depicted in "Gerontion": an old man whose perspective on the world is so limited that he necessarily sees historical change as the augury of apocalypse. In contrast, the parable of the thunder in The Waste Land presents "a turning back to Asia, to the source," and its portrait of "the present decay of eastern Europe" is as ambiguous as Hesse's analysis of Dostoevsky and the history of the modern world: But quite another question is how we are to regard this Downfall. Here we are at the parting of the ways. Those who cling definitely to the past, those who venerate time-honoured cultural forms, the Knights of a treasured morality, must seek to delay this Downfall and will mourn it inconsolably when it passes. For them the Downfall is the End; for the others, it is the Beginning. For the first, Dostoevsky is a criminal, for the others a Saint. For the one party Europe and its soul constitute an entity once and for all, foreordained, inviolate, a thing fixed and immutable. For the other it is a becoming, a mutable, ever-changing thing.51 In The Waste Land, history is a mutable, ever-changing thing. Eliot's use of the parable of the thunder reveals that he tried to depict

236

CHAPTER 10

what may appear as "the present decay of eastern Europe" in the context of a long tradition that leads us back to the very origins of language. Even the modern world of the "Unreal City" is part of the "whole truth," a moment resting on the accumulation of the "entire past." Only the inspired poet, Hesse and Eliot agreed, can see beyond the chaos to the "possibilities of the New Life" that it portends. When Eliot drafted the final lines of The Waste Land, the poem's most famous line did not read "These fragments I have shored against my ruins" but "These fragments I have spelt into my ruins" (WLF, 81). The change to "shored against" is consonant with Eliot's final revisions of the poem: the selection of the title, the addition of the notes, and later on, the description of the "mythical method." These textual revisions and critical pronouncements constitute the first interpretation oiThe Waste Land, and it led a generation of readers (in Eliot's phrase) to see "their own illusion of being disillusioned" in the poem (SE, 324). To think of Eliot spelling the fragments of the past into his present ruins rather than shoring them against his ruins makes it easier to see the poem as an attempt to express wholeness (whether personal, historical, or spiritual). Exfoliating from the thunderous and meaningless "DA," The Waste Land spells the entire history of language into the texture of modern English. The final lines of the poem move from Sanskrit to Latin, Provengal, French, and back to the mystical origins of language and tradition in the Sanskrit "Shantih"— "The Peace which passeth understanding." This use of the parable of the thunder embodies the lesson of "The Three Provincialities," an essay on the fate of English language and literature that Eliot published in the same year as The Waste Land: Whatever words a writer employs, he benefits by knowing as much as possible of the history of these words, of the uses to which they have already been applied. Such knowledge facilitates his task of giving to the word a new life and to the language a new idiom. The essential of tradition is in this; in getting as much as possible of the whole weight of history of the language behind the word.52 The Waste Land reveals such a tradition operating successfully, yet the success is only partial. Even with the divine assistance Eliot be-

THE WASTELAND

237

lieved was necessary to realize "the whole truth," he knew that his attempt to express this whole must ultimately fail. Like Pound's Cantos, The Waste Land vacillates between the assurance of transcendental vision and a skepticism that threatens to obliterate the possibility of knowledge altogether. Yet like Pound, Eliot might have written that "it coheres all right / even if my notes do not cohere" (114/797). The Waste Land presents a divided sensibility very much like that of Pater's Renaissance: while describing the prison of consciousness, both works depend upon the idea of an eternal mind that makes the entire past available in the present. After The Waste Land Eliot would never again attempt to write a poem so thickened by historical reference. The Waste Land remains the ultimate "poem including history" produced in the twentieth century, and if Yeats was right to present Pater's La Gioconda as the first "modern" poem, then The Waste Land may well be the last.

Notes

Preface 1. Sanford Schwartz, The Matrix of Modernism: Pound, Eliot, and Early Twentieth-Century Thought (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 3-4. 2. Johann Gustav Droysen, Outline of the Principles of History, trans. Benjamin Andrewes (New York: Howard Fertig, 1967), p. 114. Droysen's Grundriss der Historik was first published in 1868 after having been circulated in manuscript for over a decade. 3. Geoffrey H. Hartman, "The Culture of Criticism," PMLA 94 (1984): 372. Introduction 1. Eliot's drafts of "Gerontion" are part of his poetry notebook in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library. For another reading of Eliot's revision of "Gerontion," see Gregory S.Jay, T. S. Eliot a?id the Poetics ofLiterary History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1983), pp. 22-30. 2. For an examination of the eighteenth-century roots of nineteenth-century historicism, see Ernst Cassirer, The Problem of Knowhdge: Phihsophy, Science, and History since Hegel, trans. William H. Woglom and Charles W. Hendel (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1950), pp. 217-225. Although it stresses more conventional periodization, Michel Foucault's The Order of Things: An Archaeohgy of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, 1970) also offers a useful account of the rise of nineteenth-century historicism. 3. John Stuart Mill, Mill's Essays on Literature and Society, ed. J. B. Schneewind (New York: Macmillan, 1965), p. 28. 4. Arthur Galton, Urbana Scripta: Studies in Five Living Poets (London: Elliot Stock, 1885), pp. 18,20-22. 5. William Morris, The Collected Works of William Morris (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1914), 22:321. 6. Matthew Arnold, Compute Prose Worh, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1960-1977), 1:20-21. 7. Peter Allan Dale, The Victorian Critic and the Idea ofHistory (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1977), p. 4.

240

NOTES TO PAGES 6-7

8. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea ofHistory (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1946), pp. 164—165. Although I stress the bias of modern historiography toward hermeneutics and away from historical patterning, I should caution that historians such as Pater and Burckhardt (and poets such as Pound and Eliot) who do not model their histories on an overt schema nevertheless present an implicit pattern for the rise of western culture. For a synoptic treatment of this aspect of modern thought, see Jeffrey M. Perl, The Tradition of Return: The Implicit History of Modern Literature (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1984). Working from a large base of data Perl points out that in the work of modern historians there is an ideological or even artistic patterning of history, and it is this which five centuries of controversy about classicism and Renaissance have most concerned. For hundreds of years it had been presupposed, and during the last century and a half it has been explicitly argued, that Western history falls into three stages—ancient, medieval, modern—and that the third stage is a kind of re-creation of the first, commencing with a Renaissance or rebirth. Periods have thus been balanced off one another aesthetically, and historical analysts have even looked at time as though it naturally possessed a circular or elliptical shape. Modernity for these thinkers is not merely an historical period; its positing implies a reordering of human experience according to normative principles that the historians themselves set down. (p. 9) 9. Collingwood remarks that Spengler's work was a "relapse into naturalistic positivism" and stands in "sharp contrast . . . to the work of the better twentieth-century German historians" (p. 181). 10. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse ofHistory, trans. Adrian Collins (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1957), pp. 37-38. 11. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in NineteenthCentury Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1973), p. 372. 12.1 use the word "historicism" to mean any kind of philosophical thinking about the nature of historical change (not necessarily progressive or even chronological) and the status of historical knowledge. I do not necessarily intend to invoke the negative connotations sometimes attached to the word. See Maurice Mandelbaum, History, Man, and Reason (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 41-50 for a discussion of the meaning of historicism. See Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (London: Routledge Sc Kegan Paul, 1961) for a presentation of historicism as a dangerous ideology. 13. Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight, 2nd ed. rev. (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1983), pp. 144, 148, 150. In Yeats, Eliot, Pound and tke Politics of Poetry (London: Croom Helm, 1982), Cairns Craig also sees modern poetry as a response to Nietzsche's historicism:

NOTESTO PAGES 7-11

241

It is the challenge of Nietzsche's conception of history—implicitly if not explicitly—which Yeats, Eliot, and Pound try to meet through their poetry of memory: it is a poetry which seeks to test itself against the measure of an 'absence for the historical sense to overgrow and work harm', which seeks to incorporate all of the past into its own inner nature, (pp. 150-151) 14. De Man, p. 165. 15. Nietzsche, p. 12. 16. See Hayden V. White, "The Burden of History," History and Theory 5 (1966): 111-134 for an examination of turn-of-the-century antihistoricism. Antihistoricism was not so ubiquitous a philosophy as White maintains, however. 17. James Joyce, Dubliners (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), p. 223. 18. Nietzsche, p. 42. 19. Richard Langhorne, "Historiography," in The Twentieth-Century Mind: History, Ideas, and Literature in Britain, 1900-1918, ed. C. B. Cox and A. E. Dyson (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1972), p. 100. See Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1983) for a wide-ranging examination of the variety of conceptions of time and history that are expressed in modern art, literature, philosophy, and culture. 20. See White, Metahistory, pp. 267-280 for an analysis of the causes of the crisis of historicism. 21. Wyndham Lewis, "A Later Arm than Barbarity," Outlook 24 (5 September 1914): 298-299. 22. This passage is quoted from a manuscript in the Firestone Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Princeton University, in James Longenbach, "Ford Madox Ford: The Novelist as Historian," Princeton University Library Chronicle 45 (1984): 161-162. 23. Ford Madox Ford, It Was the Nightingale (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1933), p. 199. 24. Wilhelm Dilthey, Gesammelte Schriften (Leipzig: Teubner; Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1914-1977), 4:529; translation in Michael Ermarth, Wilhelm Dilthey: The Critique of Historical Reason (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1971), pp. 319-320. 25. Quoted in David E. Linge's introduction to Hans-Georg Gadamer, Phibsophical Hermeneutics, ed. David E. Linge (Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1976), p. xv. 26. Collingwood, p. 219. 27. T. S. Eliot, "War-paint and Feathers," Athenaeum 4668 (17 October 1919): 1036. 28. T. S. Eliot, "A Note on Ezra Pound," To-day 4 (September 1918): 4.

242

NOTES TO PAGES 12-16

29. Henry James, The Sense of the Past (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1945), p. 66. 30. T. S. Eliot, "The Hawthorne Aspect [of Henry James]," Little Review 5 (August 1918): 50. 31. Ezra Pound, "Wyndham Lewis,"Egoist 1 (15 June 1914): 234. 32. Fredric Jameson, "Marxism and Historicism, "JVZi/11 (1979): 50-51. 33. Droysen, pp. 52-53. 34. Wilhelm Dilthey, Sekcted Writings, ed. and trans. H. P. Rickman (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1976), p. 260. Only a handful of DiIthey's writings have been translated. Whenever possible I will refer to this English selection. At the time of this writing, Princeton University Press has published one volume of a projected six-volume translation of Dilthey's selected works, edited by Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi. 35. Dilthey, GesammelteSchriften, 7:278; my translation. 36. See H. P. Rickman's introduction to Sekcted Writings for a discussion of the problems involved in translating Dilthey's terminology. 37. Dilthey, Sekcted Writings, p. 173. 38. Derjunge Dilthey: Ein Lebensbild in Briefen und Tagebiichern, 18521870, ed. Clara Misch (Stuttgart: B. G. Teubner, 1960), p. 87; translation in Ermarth, p. 23. 39. Jameson, p. 51. 40. Dilthey, Gesammelte Schriften, 4:250; translation in Maurice Mandelbaum, The Probkm of Historical Knowledge (New York: Liveright Publishing Corp., 1938), p. 59. 41. Dilthey, Sekcted Writings, p. 194. Despite Dilthey's emphasis on the concrete manifestations of life, however, he was finally more dependent on Romantic idealism than his rhetoric reveals. In Truth and Method, trans. Garrett Barden and John Cumming (New York: Crossroad Publishing Co., 1982), Hans-Georg Gadamer points out that in his later writings, Dilthey began to use the word "spirit" (Geist) where he once used "life" {feben). Dilthey differs from Hegel, says Gadamer, in essentially one thing: both locate the ultimate reality in a world of spirit, but "according to Hegel the return home of the spirit takes place in the philosophical concept whereas for Dilthey, the significance of the philosophical concept is not as knowledge, but as expression" (p. 202). 42. Dilthey, Sekcted Writings, pp. 177-178. For a discussion of "life" and how it makes "understanding" possible in Dilthey's writings, see Richard E. Palmer, Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schkiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 106121. 43. Dilthey, Sekcted Writings, pp. 208, 76.

NOTES TO PAGES 16-25

243

44. Benedetto Croce, History: Its Theory and Practice, trans. Douglas Ainslie (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1921), p. 134. 45. Jameson, pp. 51-52. 46. Dilthey, Selected Writings, p. 215. 47. Ezra Pound, "Three Cantos I,"Poetry 10 (June 1917): 114. 48. Jameson, p. 51. 49. Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man (1928; rpt. Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), pp. 192, 71. Lewis found Pound's interest in the past excessive: "He has never loved anything living as he has loved the dead" (p. 71). 50. Ezra Pound, "Affirmations: Arnold Dolmetsch," New Age 16 (7 January 1915):246. 51. Oscar Wilde, The Complete Worh, ed. Vyvyan Holland (London: Collins, 1966), p. 1041. 52. T. S. Eliot, "Reflections on Contemporary Poetry [IV],"Egoist 6 (July 1919):39. 53. T. S. Eliot, The Complete Plays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1967), pp. 237,238. 54. T. S. Eliot, Introduction to Savonarola: A Dramatic Poem, by Charlotte Eliot (London: R. Cobden-Sanderson, 1926), p. viii. Eliot is discussing "The Interpretation of Primitive Ritual," a paper he presented in Josiah Royce's graduate seminar at Harvard in 1913. 55. W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (New York: Macmillan, 1961), p. 253. 56. Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Neville Rogers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 1:246-247. 57. Yeats, Essays and Introductions, p. 74. 58. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation ofEuropean Social Thought 1890-1930, rev. ed. (New York: Vintage, 1977), p. 34. 59. Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel (New York: Vintage, 1951), p. 116. 60. For Pound's use of St. Victor, see chapter 2 below; for Eliot's reading in mysticism and "traditionalism," see chapter 10. 61. A. R. Orage, "Henry James, and the Ghostly," Little Review 5 (August 1918): 43. 62. Eliot, "Hawthorne Aspect," p. 53. 63. Orage, pp. 41-42. 64. Samuel Hynes, The Edwardian Turn of Mind (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 139, 145. For a discussion of how modern science made the resurgence of occult studies possible, see also Tom Gibbons, Rooms in the Darwin Hotel: Studies in English Literary Theory, Criticism, and Ideas 1880-1920 (Nedlands, West Australia: Univ. of Western Australia Press, 1973). 65. "On Spiritualism,"JV