Part 28 (2/2)

Dear Mr. Pound:

Many thanks for your letter of the other day. I am afraid I must say frankly that I do not think I can open the columns of the _Q.R._--at any rate, at present--to any one a.s.sociated publicly with such a publication as _Blast._ It stamps a man too disadvantageously.

Yours truly, G.W. Prothero.

Of course, having accepted your paper on the _Noh_, I could not refrain from publis.h.i.+ng it. But other things would be in a different category.

I need scarcely say that _The Quarterly Review_ is one of the most profitable periodicals in England, and one of one's best ”connections,”

or sources of income. It has, of course, a tradition.

”It is not that Mr. Keats (if that be his real name, for we almost doubt that any man in his senses would put his real name to such a rhapsody)”--

write their Gifford of Keats' ”Endymion.” My only comment is that the _Quarterly_ has done it again. Their Mr. A. Waugh is a lineal descendant of Gifford, by way of mentality. A century has not taught them manners.

In the eighteen forties they were still defending the review of Keats.

And more recently Waugh has lifted up his senile s...o...b..r against Mr.

Eliot. It is indeed time that the functions of both English and American literature were taken over by younger and better men.

As for their laying the birch on my pocket. I compute that my support of Lewis and Brzeska has cost me at the lowest estimate about 20 per year, from one source alone since that regrettable occurrence, since I dared to discern a great sculptor and a great painter in the midst of England's artistic desolation. (”European and Asiatic papers please copy.”)

Young men, desirous of finding before all things smooth berths and elderly consolations, are cautioned to behave more circ.u.mspectly.

The generation that preceded us does not care much whether we understand French individualism, or the difference between the good and bad in French literature. Nor is it conceivable that any of them would write to a foreigner: ”indications of ideas, rather than work accomplished, but I will send you my best.”

De Gourmont's next communication to me was an inquiry about Gaudier-Brzeska's sculpture.

[1] ”A German study,” Hobson; ”A German study,” Tarr.

[2] Quoted in _L.R._, February, 1918.

[3] Each of the senses has its own particular eunuchs.

IV

IN THE VORTEX[1]

Eliot Joyce Lewis An historical essayist The new poetry Breviora

T.S. ELIOT

_Il n'y a de livres que ceux ou un ecrivain s'est raconte lui-meme en racontant les murs de ses contemporains--leurs reves, leurs vanites, leurs amours, et leurs folies_.-- Remy de Gourmont.

De Gourmont uses this sentence in writing of the incontestable superiority of ”Madame Bovary,” ”L'education Sentimentale” and ”Bouvard et Pecuchet” to ”Salammbo” and ”La Tentation de St. Antoine.” A casual thought convinces one that it is true for all prose. Is it true also for poetry? One may give lat.i.tude to the interpretation of _reves_; the gross public would have the poet write little else, but De Gourmont keeps a proportion. The vision should have its place in due setting if we are to believe its reality.

The few poems which Mr. Eliot has given us maintain this proportion, as they maintain other proportions of art. After much contemporary work that is merely fact.i.tious, much that is good in intention but impotently unfinished and incomplete; much whose flaws are due to sheer ignorance which a year's study or thought might have remedied, it is a comfort to come upon complete art, nave despite its intellectual subtlety, lacking all pretense.

<script>