Early Writings Page 26
There still remains the song to sing: to be ‘set to music’, and of this sort of poem Mr Hueffer has given us notable examples in his rendering of Von der Vogelweide’s ‘Tandaradei’ and, in lighter measure, in his own ‘The Three-Ten’:
‘When in the prime and May-day time dead lovers went a-
walking,
How bright the grass in lads’ eyes was, how easy poet’s talking!
Here were green hills and daffodils, and copses to contain them:
Daisies for floors did front their doors agog for maids to chain
them.
So when the ray of rising day did pierce the eastern heaven
Maids did arise to make the skies seem brighter far by seven.
Now here’s a street where ‘bus routes meet, and ’twixt the wheels
and paving
Standeth a lout who doth hold out flowers not worth the having.
But see, but see! The clock strikes three above the Kilburn Station,
Those maids, thank God, are ’neath the sod and all their generation.
What she shall wear who’ll soon appear, it is not hood nor
wimple,
But by the powers there are no flowers so stately or so simple.
And paper shops and full ’bus tops confront the sun so brightly,
That, come three-ten, no lovers then had hearts that beat so
lightly
As ours or loved more truly,
Or found green shades or flowered glades to fit their loves more
duly.
And see, and see! ’Tis ten past three above the Kilburn Station,
Those maids, thank God! are ’neath the sod and all their
generation.’
Oh well, there are very few song writers in England, and it’s a simple old-fashioned song with a note of futurism in its very lyric refrain; and I dare say you will pay as little attention to it as I did five years ago. And if you sing it aloud, once over, to yourself, I dare say you’ll be just as incapable of getting it out of your head, which is perhaps one test of a lyric.
It is not, however, for Mr Hueffer’s gift of song-writing that I have reviewed him at such length; this gift is rare but not novel. I find him significant and revolutionary because of his insistence upon clarity and precision, upon the prose tradition; in brief, upon efficient writing—even in verse.
VORTICISM
I had put the fundamental tenet of vorticism in a “Vortex” in the first Blast as follows:—
Every concept, every emotion presents itself to the vivid consciousness in some primary form. It belongs to the art of this form. If sound, to music; if formed words, to literature; the image, to poetry; form, to design; colour in position, to painting; form or design in three planes, to sculpture; movement, to the dance or to the rhythm of music or verses.
I defined the vortex as “the point of maximum energy,” and said that the vorticist relied on the “primary pigment,” and on that alone.
These statements seemed to convey very little to people unfamiliar with our mode of thought, so I tried to make myself clear, as follows:—
VORTICISM
“It is no more ridiculous that a person should receive or convey an emotion by means of an arrangement of shapes, or planes, or colours, than that they should receive or convey such emotion by an arrangement of musical notes.”
I suppose this proposition is self-evident. Whistler said as much, some years ago, and Pater proclaimed that “All arts approach the conditions of music.”
Whenever I say this I am greeted with a storm of “Yes, but” ... s. “But why isn’t this art futurism?” “Why isn’t?” “Why don’t?” and above all: “What, in Heaven’s name, has it got to do with your Imagiste poetry?”
Let me explain at leisure, and in nice, orderly, old-fashioned prose.
We are all futurists to the extent of believing with Guillaume Apollinaire that “On ne peut pas porter partout avec soi le cadavre de son père.” But “futurism,” when it gets into art, is, for the most part, a descendant of impressionism. It is a sort of accelerated impressionism.
There is another artistic descent viâ Picasso and Kandinsky; viâ cubism and expressionism. One does not complain of neo-impressionism or of accelerated impressionism and “simultaneity,” but one is not wholly satisfied by them. One has perhaps other needs.
It is very difficult to make generalities about three arts at once. I shall be, perhaps, more lucid if I give, briefly, the history of the vorticist art with which I am most intimately connected, that is to say, vorticist poetry. Vorticism has been announced as including such and such painting and sculpture and “Imagisme” in verse. I shall explain “Imagisme,” and then proceed to show its inner relation to certain modern paintings and sculpture.
Imagisme, in so far as it has been known at all, has been known chiefly as a stylistic movement, as a movement of criticism rather than of creation. This is natural, for, despite all possible celerity of publication, the public is always, and of necessity, some years behind the artists’ actual thought. Nearly anyone is ready to accept “Imagisme” as a department of poetry, just as one accepts “lyricism” as a department of poetry.
There is a sort of poetry where music, sheer melody, seems as if it were just bursting into speech.
There is another sort of poetry where painting or sculpture seems as if it were “just coming over into speech.”
The first sort of poetry has long been called “lyric.” One is accustomed to distinguish easily between “lyric” and “epic” and “didactic.” One is capable of finding the “lyric” passages in a drama or in a long poem not otherwise “lyric.” This division is in the grammars and school books, and one has been brought up to it.
The other sort of poetry is as old as the lyric and as honourable, but, until recently, no one had named it. Ibycus and Liu Ch’e1 presented the “Image.” Dante is a great poet by reason of this faculty, and Milton is a wind-bag because of his lack of it. The “image” is the furthest possible remove from rhetoric. Rhetoric is the art of dressing up some unimportant matter so as to fool the audience for the time being. So much for the general category. Even Aristotle distinguishes between rhetoric, “which is persuasion,” and the analytical examination of truth. As a “critical” movement, the “Imagisme” of 1912 to ’14 set out “to bring poetry up to the level of prose.” No one is so quixotic as to believe that contemporary poetry holds any such position.... Stendhal formulated the need in his De L’Amour:—
“La poésie avec ses comparaisons obligées, sa mythologie que ne croit pas le poète, sa dignité de style à la Louis XIV et tout l’attirail de ses ornements appelés poétique, est bien au dessous de la prose dès qu’il s’agit de donner une idée claire et precise des mouvements de cœur, or dans ce genre on n’émeut que par la clarté.”
Flaubert and De Maupassant lifted prose to the rank of a finer art, and one has no patience with contemporary poets who escape from all the difficulties of the infinitely difficult art of good prose by pouring themselves into loose verses.
The tenets of the Imagiste faith were published in March, 1913, as follows:—I. Direct treatment of the “thing,” whether subjective or objective.
II. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
III. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome.
There followed a series of about forty cautions to beginners, which need not concern us here.
The arts have indeed “some sort of common bond, some inter-recognition.” Yet certain emotions or subjects find their most appropriate expression in some one particular art. The work of art which is most “worth while” is the work which would need a hundred works of any other kind of art to explain it. A fine statue is the core of a hundred poems. A fine poem is a score of symphonies. There is music which would need a hundred paintings to express it. There is no synonym for the Victory of Samothrace or for Mr. Epst
ein’s flenites.2 There is no painting of Villon’s Frères Humains. Such works are what we call works of the “first intensity.”
A given subject or emotion belongs to that artist, or to that sort of artist who must know it most intimately and most intensely before he can render it adequately in his art. A painter must know much more about a sunset than a writer, if he is to put it on canvas. But when the poet speaks of “Dawn in russet mantle clad,” he presents something which the painter cannot present.
I said in the preface to my Guido Cavalcanti3 that I believed in an absolute rhythm. I believe that every emotion and every phase of emotion has some toneless phrase, some rhythm-phrase to express it.
(This belief leads to vers libre and to experiments in quantitative verse.)
To hold a like belief in a sort of permanent metaphor is, as I understand it, “symbolism” in its profounder sense. It is not necessarily a belief in a permanent world, but it is a belief in that direction.
Imagisme is not symbolism. The symbolists dealt in “association,” that is, in a sort of allusion, almost of allegory. They degraded the symbol to the status of a word. They made it a form of metonomy. One can be grossly “symbolic,” for example, by using the term “cross” to mean “trial.” The symbolist’s symbols have a fixed value, like numbers in arithmetic, like 1, 2, and 7. The imagiste’s images have a variable significance, like the signs a, b, and x in algebra.
Moreover, one does not want to be called a symbolist, because symbolism has usually been associated with mushy technique.
On the other hand, Imagisme is not Impressionism, though one borrows, or could borrow, much from the impressionist method of presentation. But this is only negative definition. If I am to give a psychological or philosophical definition “from the inside,” I can only do so autobiographically. The precise statement of such a matter must be based on one’s own experience.
In the “search for oneself,” in the search for “sincere self-expression,” one gropes, one finds some seeming verity. One says “I am” this, that, or the other, and with the words scarcely uttered one ceases to be that thing.
I began this search for the real in a book called Personae, casting off, as it were, complete masks of the self in each poem. I continued in long series of translations, which were but more elaborate masks.
Secondly, I made poems like “The Return,” which is an objective reality and has a complicated sort of significance, like Mr. Epstein’s “Sun God,” or Mr. Brzeska’s “Boy with a Coney.” Thirdly, I have written “Heather,” which represents a state of consciousness, or “implies,” or “implicates” it.
A Russian correspondent, after having called it a symbolist poem, and having been convinced that it was not symbolism, said slowly: “I see, you wish to give people new eyes, not to make them see some new particular thing.”
These two latter sorts of poems are impersonal, and that fact brings us back to what I said about absolute metaphor. They are Imagisme, and in so far as they are Imagisme, they fall in with the new pictures and the new sculpture.
Whistler said somewhere in the Gentle Art: “The picture is interesting not because it is Trotty Veg, but because it is an arrangement in colour.” The minute you have admitted that, you let in the jungle, you let in nature and truth and abundance and cubism and Kandinsky,4 and the lot of us. Whistler and Kandinsky and some cubists were set to getting extraneous matter out of their art; they were ousting literary values. The Flaubertians talk a good deal about “constatation.” “The ’nineties” saw a movement against rhetoric. I think all these things move together, though they do not, of course, move in step.
The painters realise that what matters is form and colour. Musicians long ago learned that programme music was not the ultimate music. Almost anyone can realize that to use a symbol with an ascribed or intended meaning is, usually, to produce very bad art. We all remember crowns, and crosses, and rainbows, and what not in atrociously mumbled colour.
The image is the poet’s pigment. ai The painter should use his colour because he sees it or feels it. I don’t much care whether he is representative or non-representative. He should depend, of course, on the creative, not upon the mimetic or representational part in his work. It is the same in writing poems, the author must use his image because he sees it or feels it, not because he thinks he can use it to back up some creed or some system of ethics or economics.
An image, in our sense, is real because we know it directly. If it have an age-old traditional meaning this may serve as proof to the professional student of symbology that we have stood in the deathless light, or that we have walked in some particular arbour of his traditional paradiso, but that is not our affair. It is our affair to render the image as we have perceived or conceived it.
Browning’s “Sordello” is one of the finest masks ever presented. Dante’s “Paradiso” is the most wonderful image. By that I do not mean that it is a perseveringly imagistic performance. The permanent part is Imagisme, the rest, the discourses with the calendar of saints and the discussions about the nature of the moon, are philology. The form of sphere above sphere, the varying reaches of light, the minutiæ of pearls upon foreheads, all these are parts of the Image. The image is the poet’s pigment; with that in mind you can go ahead and apply Kandinsky, you can transpose his chapter on the language of form and colour and apply it to the writing of verse. As I cannot rely on your having read Kandinsky’s Ueber das Geistige in der Kunst, I must go on with my autobiography.
Three years ago in Paris I got out of a “metro” train at La Concorde, and saw suddenly a beautiful face, and then another and another, and then a beautiful child’s face, and then another beautiful woman, and I tried all that day to find words for what this had meant to me, and I could not find any words that seemed to me worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion. And that evening, as I went home along the Rue Raynouard, I was still trying and I found, suddenly, the expression. I do not mean that I found words, but there came an equation ... not in speech, but in little splotches of colour. It was just that—a “pattern,” or hardly a pattern, if by “pattern” you mean something with a “repeat” in it. But it was a word, the beginning, for me, of a language in colour. I do not mean that I was unfamiliar with the kindergarten stories about colours being like tones in music. I think that sort of thing is nonsense. If you try to make notes permanently correspond with particular colours, it is like tying narrow meanings to symbols.
That evening, in the Rue Raynouard, I realized quite vividly that if I were a painter, or if I had, often, that kind of emotion, or even if I had the energy to get paints and brushes and keep at it, I might found a new school of painting, of “non-representative” painting, a painting that would speak only by arrangements in colour.
And so, when I came to read Kandinsky’s chapter on the language of form and colour, I found little that was new to me. I only felt that some one else understood what I understood, and had written it out very clearly. It seems quite natural to me that an artist should have just as much pleasure in an arrangement of planes or in a pattern of figures, as in painting portraits of fine ladies, or in portraying the Mother of God as the symbolists bid us.
When I find people ridiculing the new arts, or making fun of the clumsy odd terms that we use in trying to talk of them amongst ourselves; when they laugh at our talking about the “ice-block quality” in Picasso, I think it is only because they do not know what thought is like, and that they are familiar only with argument and gibe and opinion. That is to say, they can only enjoy what they have been brought up to consider enjoyable, or what some essayist has talked about in mellifluous phrases. They think only “the shells of thought,” as De Gourmont calls them; the thoughts that have been already thought out by others.
Any mind that is worth calling a mind must have needs beyond the existing categories of language, just as a painter must have pigments or shades more numerous than the existing names of the colours.
Perhaps this is enou
gh to explain the words in my “Vortex”aj:—
“Every concept, every emotion, presents itself to the vivid consciousness in some primary form. It belongs to the art of this form.”
That is to say, my experience in Paris should have gone into paint. If instead of colour I had perceived sound or planes in relation, I should have expressed it in music or in sculpture. Colour was, in that instance, the “primary pigment”; I mean that it was the first adequate equation that came into consciousness. The Vorticist uses the “primary pigment.” Vorticism is art before it has spread itself into flaccidity, into elaboration and secondary applications.
What I have said of one vorticist art can be transposed for another vorticist art. But let me go on then with my own branch of vorticism, about which I can probably speak with greater clarity. All poetic language is the language of exploration. Since the beginning of bad writing, writers have used images as ornaments. The point of Imagisme is that it does not use images as ornaments. The image is itself the speech. The image is the word beyond formulated language.
I once saw a small child go to an electric light switch and say, “Mamma, can I open the light?” She was using the age-old language of exploration, the language of art. It was a sort of metaphor, but she was not using it as ornamentation.
One is tired of ornamentations, they are all a trick, and any sharp person can learn them.
The Japanese have had the sense of exploration. They have understood the beauty of this sort of knowing. A Chinaman said long ago that if a man can’t say what he has to say in twelve lines he had better keep quiet. The Japanese have evolved the still shorter form of the hokku.
“The fallen blossom flies back to its branch: A butterfly.”
That is the substance of a very well-known hokku. Victor Plarr tells me that once, when he was walking over snow with a Japanese naval officer, they came to a place where a cat had crossed the path, and the officer said, “Stop, I am making a poem.” Which poem was, roughly, as follows:—