THE LITTLE REVIEW

Inferior Religions[1]

Wyndham Lewis

I

To introduce my puppets, and the Wild Body, the generic puppet of all, I must look back to a time when the antics and solemn gambols of these wild children filled me with triumph.

The fascinating imbecility of the creaking men-machines, some little restaurant or fishing-boat works, is the subject of these studies. The boat’s tackle and dirty little shell keeps their limbs in a monotonous rhythm of activity. A man gets drunk with his boat as he would with a merry-go-round. Only it is the staid, everyday drunkenness of the normal real. We can all see the ascendance a “carrousel” has on men, driving them into a set narrow intoxication. The wheel at Carisbrooke imposes a set of movements on the donkey inside it, in drawing water from the well, that it is easy to grasp. But in the case of a fishing-boat the variety is so great, the scheme so complex, that it passes as open and untrammeled life. This subtle and wider mechanism merges, for the spectator, in the general variety of Nature. Yet we have in most lives a spectacle as complete as a problem of Euclid.

Moran, Bestre and Brobdingnag are essays in a new human mathematic. But they are each simple shapes, little monuments of logic. I should like to compile a book of forty of these propositions, one deriving from and depending on the other.

These intricately moving bobbins are all subject to a set of objects or one in particular. Brobdingnag is fascinated by one object, for instance; one at once another vitality. He bangs up against it wildly at regular intervals, blackens it, contemplates it, moves round it and dreams. All such fascination is religious. Moran’s damp napkins are the altar-cloths of his rough illusion. Julie’s bruises are the markings on an idol.

These studies of rather primitive people are studies in a Savage worship and attraction. Moran rolls between his tables ten million times in a realistic rhythm that is as intense and superstitious as the figures of a war-dance. He worships his soup, his damp napkins, the lump of flesh that rolls everywhere with him called Madam Moran.

All religion has the mechanism of the celestial bodies, has a dance. When we wish to renew our idols, or break up the rhythm of our naivety, the effort postulates a respect which is the summit of devoutness.

II

I would present these puppets, then, as carefully selected specimens of religious fanaticism. With their attendant objects or fetishes they live and have a regular food for vitality. They are not creations, but puppets. You can be as exterior to them, and live their life as little, as the showman grasping from beneath and working about a Polichinelle. They are only shadows of energy, and not living beings. Their mechanism is a logical structure and they are nothing but that.

Sam Weller, Jingle, Malvolio, Bouvard, and Pecuchet, the “commissaire” in Crime and Punishment, do not live; they are congealed and frozen into logic, and an exuberant, hysterical truth. They transcend life and are complete cyphers, but they are monuments of dead imperfection. Their only reference is to themselves, and their only significance their egoism.

The great intuitive figures of creation live with the universal egoism of the Poet. They are not picturesque and over palpable. They are supple with this rare impersonality; not stiff with a common egotism. The “realists” of the Flaubert, Maupassant, and Tchekoff school are all satirists. “Realism”, understood as applied to them, implies either photography or satire.

Satire, the great Heaven of ideas, where you meet the Titans of red laughter, is just below Intuition, and Life charged with black Illusion.

III

When we say “types of humanity”, we mean violent individualities, and nothing stereotyped. But Othello, Falstaff and Pecksniff attract, in our memory, a vivid following. All difference is energy, and a category of humanity a relatively small group, and not the myriads suggested by a generalisation.

A comic type is a failure of a considerable energy, an imitation and standardising of self, suggesting the existence of a uniform humanity,—creating, that is, a little host as like as ninepins; instead of one synthetic and various Ego. It is the laziness of a successful personality. It is often part of our own organism become a fetish.

Sairey Gamp and Falstaff are minute and rich religions. They are illusions hugged and lived in. They are like little dead Totems. Just as all Gods are a repose for humanity, the big religions an immense refuge and rest, so these little grotesque idols are. One reason for this is that, for the spectator or participator, it is a world in a corner of the world, full of rest and security.

Moran, even, advances in life with his rows of bottles and napkins; Julie is Brobdingnag’s Goddess, and figures for intercessions, if the occasion arises.

All these are forms of static and traditional art, then. There is a great deal of divine Olympian sleep in English Humour. The most gigantic spasm of laughter is sculptural, isolated and essentially simple.

IV

V

The chemistry of personality (subterranean in a sort of cemetery whose decompositions are our lives) puffs up in frigid balls, soapy Snow-men, arctic Carnival Masks, which we can photograph and fix.

Upwards from the surface of Existence a lurid and dramatic scum oozes and accumulates into the characters we see. The real and tenacious poisons, and sharp forces of vital vitality, do not socially transpire. Within five yards of another man’s eyes we are on a little crater, which, if it erupted, would split up as a cocoa-tin of nitrogen would. Some of these bombs are ill-made, or some erratic in their timing. But they are all potential little bombs.

Capriciously, however, the froth-forms of these darkly-contrived machines, twist and puff in the air, in our legitimate and liveried masquerade.

Were you the female of Moran (the first Innkeeper) and beneath the counterpane with him, you would be just below the surface of life, in touch with a nasty and tragic organism. The first indications of the proximity of the real soul would be apparent. You would be for hours beside a filmy crocodile, conscious of it like a bone in an Ex-Ray, and for minutes in the midst of a tragic wallowing. The soul lives in a cadaverous activity; its dramatic corruption thumps us like a racing engine in the body of a car. The finest humour is the great Play-Shapes blown up or given off by the tragic corpse of Life underneath the world of the Camera. This futile, grotesque and sometimes pretty spawn, is what in this book is Kodacked by the Imagination.

Any great humourist is an artist; Dickens as an example. It is just this character of uselessness and impersonality in Laughter, the fibre of anarchy in the comic habit of mind, that makes a man an artist in spite of himself when he begins living on his laughter. Laughter is the arch-luxury that is as simple as bread.

VI

In this objective Play-World, corresponding to our social consciousness as opposed to our solitude, no final issue is decided. You may blow away a Man-of-bubbles with a Burgundian gust of laughter, but that is not a personality, it is an apparition of no importance. Its awkwardness, or prettiness is accidental. But so much correspondence it has with its original that if the cadaveric travail beneath is vigorous and bitter, the mask and figurehead will be of a more original and intense grotesqueness. The opposing armies in Flanders stick up dummy men on poles for their enemies to pot at, in a spirit of fierce friendliness. It is only a dummy of this sort that is engaged in the sphere of laughter. But the real men are in the trenches underneath all the time, and are there on a more “decisive” affair. In our rather drab Revel there is a certain category of spirit that is not quite anaemic, and yet not very funny. It consists of those who take, at the Clarkson’s[2] situated at the opening of their lives, some conventional Pierrot costume, with a minimum of inverted vigour and the assurance of superior insignificance.

The King of Play is not a phantom corresponding to the Sovereign force beneath the surface. The latter must always be accepted as the skeleton at the Feast. That soul or dominant corruption is so real that he cannot rise up and take part in man’s festival as a Falstaff of unwieldy spume; if he comes at all it must be as he is, the skeleton or bogey of True Life, stuck over with corruptions and vices. He may have a certain “succès d’hystérie”.

VII

A scornful optimism, with its confidant onslaughts on our snobbism, will not make material existence a peer for our energy. The gladiator is not a perpetual monument of triumphal health. Napoleon was harried with Elbas. Moments of vision are blurred rapidly and the poet sinks into the rhetoric of the will.

But life is invisible and perfection is not in the waves or houses that the poet sees. Beauty is an icy douche of ease and happiness at something suggesting perfect conditions for an organism. A stormy landscape, and a Pigment consisting of a lake of hard, yet florid waves; delight in each brilliant scoop or ragged burst, was John Constable’s beauty. Leonardo’s consisted in a red rain on the shadowed side of heads, and heads of massive female aesthetes. Uccello accumulated pale parallels, and delighted in cold architecture of distinct colour. Korin found in the symmetrical gushing of water, in waves like huge vegetable insects, traced and worked faintly, on a golden pâte, his business. Cézanne liked cumbrous, democratic slabs of life, slightly leaning, transfixed in vegetable intensity.

Beauty is an immense predilection, a perfect conviction of the desirability of a certain thing. To a man with long and consumptive fingers a sturdy hand may be heaven. Equilibrium and “perfection” may be a bore to the perfect. The most universally pleasing man is something probably a good way from “perfection”. Henri Fabre was in every way a superior being to Bernard, and he knew of elegant grubs which he would prefer to the painter’s nymphs.

It is obvious, though, that we should live a little more in small communities.

[1] [Editor’s note: This essay was written as the introduction to a volume of short stories containing “Inn-Keepers and Bestre”, “Unlucky for Pringle” and some others which had appeared in The English Review under Ford Madox Hueffer’s editorship, and in other English periodicals. The book was in process of publication (the author had even been paid an advance on it) when war broke out. The last member of the publishing firm has been killed in France, and the firm disbanded. The essay is complete in itself and need not stand as an “introduction”. It is perhaps the most important single document that Wyndham Lewis has written. Such stories as had not been previously published will appear in later numbers of The Little Review.—E. P.]

[2] Editor’s foot note: Clarkson, a London theatrical costumer.

Ezra Pound

“I hate a dumpy woman”
—George Gordon, Lord Byron

[3] [Note: It is through no fault of my own that this diversion was not given to the reader two years ago; but the commercial said it would not add to their transcendent popularity, and the vers-libre fanatics pointed out that I had used a form of terminal consonance no longer permitted, and my admirers (j’en ai), ever nobly desirous of erecting me into a sort of national institution, declared the work “unworthy” of my mordant and serious genius. So a couple of the old gentlemen are dead in the interim, and, alas, two of the great men mentioned in passing, and the reader will have to accept the opusculus for what it is, some rhymes written in 1915. I would give them now with dedication “To the Anonymous Compatriot Who Produced the Poem ‘Fanny’, Somewhere About 1820”, if this form of centennial homage be permitted me. It was no small thing to have written, in America, at that distant date, a poem of over forty pages which one can still read without labour. E. P.]

[4] Pronounce like respectable Russians: “Mussqu”.

T. H. Eliot

II

The suburban evening was grey and yellow on Sunday; the gardens of the small houses to left and right were rank with ivy and tall grass and lilac bushes; the tropical South London verdure was dusty above and mouldy below; the tepid air swarmed with flies. Eeldrop, at the window, welcomed the smoky smell of lilac, the gramophones, the choir of the Baptist chapel, and the sight of three small girls playing cards on the steps of the police station.

“On such a night as this”, said Eeldrop, “I often think of Scheherazade, and wonder what has become of her”.

Appleplex rose without speaking and turned to the files which contained the documents for his “Survey of Contemporary Society”. He removed the file marked London from between the files Barcelona and Boston where it had been misplaced, and turned over the papers rapidly. “The lady you mention”, he rejoined at last, “whom I have listed not under S. but as Edith, alias Scheherazade, has left but few evidences in my possession. Here is an old laundry account which she left for you to pay, a cheque drawn by her and marked “R/D”, a letter from her mother in Honolulu (on ruled paper), a poem written on a restaurant bill—”To Atthis”—and a letter by herself, on Lady Equistep’s best notepaper, containing some damaging but entertaining information about Lady Equistep. Then there are my own few observations on two sheets of foolscap”.

“Edith”, murmured Eeldrop, who had not been attending to this catalogue, “I wonder what has become of her. ‘Not pleasure, but fulness of life ... to burn ever with a hard gem-like flame’, those were her words. What curiosity and passion for experience! Perhaps that flame has burnt itself out by now.”

“You ought to inform yourself better”, said Appleplex severely, “Edith dines sometimes with Mrs Howexden, who tells me that her passion for experience has taken her to a Russian pianist in Bayswater. She is also said to be present often at the Anarchist Tea Rooms, and can usually be found in the evening at the Cafe de l’Orangerie.”

“Well”, replied Eeldrop, “I confess that I prefer to wonder what has become of her. I do not like to think of her future. Scheherazade grown old! I see her grown very plump, full-bosomed, with blond hair, living in a small flat with a maid, walking in the Park with a Pekinese, motoring with a Jewish stock-broker. With a fierce appetite for food and drink, when all other appetite is gone, all other appetite gone except the insatiable increasing appetite of vanity; rolling on two wide legs, rolling in motorcars, rolling toward a diabetic end in a seaside watering place”.

“Just now you saw that bright flame burning itself out,” said Appleplex, “now you see it guttering thickly, which proves that your vision was founded on imagination, not on feeling. And the passion for experience—have you remained so impregnably Pre-Raphaelite as to believe in that? What real person, with the genuine resources of instinct, has ever believed in the passion for experience? The passion for experience is a criticism of the sincere, a creed only of the histrionic. The passionate person is passionate about this or that, perhaps about the least significant things, but not about experience. But Marius, des Esseintes, Edith....”

“But consider”, said Eeldrop, attentive only to the facts of Edith’s history, and perhaps missing the point of Appleplex’s remarks, “her unusual career. The daughter of a piano tuner in Honolulu, she secured a scholarship at the University of California, where she graduated with Honours in Social Ethics. She then married a celebrated billiard professional in San Francisco, after an acquaintance of twelve hours, lived with him for two days, joined a musical comedy chorus, and was divorced in Nevada. She turned up several years later in Paris and was known to all the Americans and English at the Cafe du Dome as Mrs Short. She reappeared in London as Mrs Griffiths, published a small volume of verse, and was accepted in several circles known to us. And now, as I still insist, she has disappeared from society altogether.”

“The memory of Scheherazade”, said Appleplex, “is to me that of Bird’s custard and prunes in a Bloomsbury boarding house. It is not my intention to represent Edith as merely disreputable. Neither is she a tragic figure. I want to know why she misses. I cannot altogether analyse her ‘into a combination of known elements’ but I fail to touch anything definitely unanalysable.

“Is Edith, in spite of her romantic past, pursuing steadily some hidden purpose of her own? Are her migrations and eccentricities the sign of some unguessed consistency? I find in her a quantity of shrewd observation, an excellent fund of criticism, but I cannot connect them into any peculiar vision. Her sarcasm at the expense of her friends is delightful, but I doubt whether it is more than an attempt to mould herself from outside, by the impact of hostilities, to emphasise her isolation. Everyone says of her, ‘How perfectly impenetrable!’ I suspect that within there is only the confusion of a dusty garret”.

“I test people”, said Eeldrop, “by the way in which I imagine them as waking up in the morning. I am not drawing upon memory when I imagine Edith waking to a room strewn with clothes, papers, cosmetics, letters and a few books, the smell of Violettes de Parme and stale tobacco. The sunlight beating in through broken blinds, and broken blinds keeping out the sun until Edith can compel herself to attend to another day, Yet the vision does not give me much pain. I think of her as an artist without the slightest artistic power”.

“The artistic temperament—” began Appleplex.

“No, not that”. Eeldrop snatched away the opportunity. “I mean that what holds the artist together is the work which he does; separate him from his work and he either disintegrates or solidifies. There is no interest in the artist apart from his work. And there are, as you said, those people who provide material for the artist. Now Edith’s poem ‘To Atthis’ proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that she is not an artist. On the other hand I have often thought of her, as I thought this evening, as presenting possibilities for poetic purposes. But the people who can be material for art must have in them something unconscious, something which they do not fully realise or understand. Edith, in spite of what is called her impenetrable mask, presents herself too well. I cannot use her; she uses herself too fully. Partly for the same reason I think, she fails to be an artist: she does not live at all upon instinct. The artist is part of him a drifter, at the mercy of impressions, and another part of him allows this to happen for the sake of making use of the unhappy creature. But in Edith the division is merely the rational, the cold and detached part of the artist, itself divided. Her material, her experience that is, is already a mental product, already digested by reason. Hence Edith (I only at this moment arrive at understanding) is really the most orderly person in existence, and the most rational. Nothing ever happens to her; everything that happens is her own doing.”

“And hence also”, continued Appleplex, catching up the thread, “Edith is the least detached of all persons, since to be detached is to be detached from one’s self, to stand by and criticise coldly one’s own passions and vicissitudes. But in Edith the critic is coaching the combatant.”

“Edith is not unhappy”.

“She is dissatisfied, perhaps”.

“But again I say, she is not tragic: she is too rational. And in her career there is no progression, no decline or degeneration. Her condition is once and for always. There is and will be no catastrophe”.

“But I am tired. I still wonder what Edith and Mrs Howexden have in common. This invites the consideration (you may not perceive the connection) of Sets and Society, a subject which we can pursue tomorrow night”.

Appleplex looked a little embarrassed. “I am dining with Mrs Howexden”, he said. “But I will reflect upon the topic before I see you again”.

IV

(Walter Villerant to Mrs. Bland Burn)

Ezra Pound

My dear Lydia:

Your rather irascible husband asks for “Aunt Sallys”[5]; with the Pyrenees before me and at this late date, it is difficult to provide them. I agree with at least half he says. I am, with qualifications, Malthusian. I should consent to breed under pressure, if I were convinced in any way of the reasonableness of reproducing the species. But my nerves and the nerves of any woman I could live with three months, would produce only a victim—beautiful perhaps, but a victim: expiring of aromatic pain from the jasmine, lacking in impulse, a mere bundle of discriminations. If I were wealthy I might subsidize a stud of young peasants, or a tribal group in Tahiti. At present “valga mas estar soltero”, I will not take Miss J., nor her income, nor the female disciple of John.

There is no truce between art and the public. The public celebrates its eucharists with dead bodies. Its writers aspire to equal the oyster: to get themselves swallowed alive. They encompass it.

Art that sells on production is bad art, essentially. It is art that is made to demand. It suits the public. The taste of the public is bad. The taste of the public is always bad. It is bad because it is not an individual expression, but merely a mania for assent, a mania to be “in on it”.

Even the botches of a good artist have some quality, some distinction, which prevents their pleasing mass-palates.

Good art weathers the ages because once in so often a man of intelligence commands the mass to adore it. His contemporaries call him a nuisance, their children follow his instructions, include him in the curricula. I am not lifting my voice in protest; I am merely defining a process. I do not protest against the leaves falling in autumn.

The arts are kept up by a very few people; they always have been kept up, when kept up at all, by a very few people. A great art patron is a man who keeps up great artists. A good art patron is a man who keeps up good artists. His reputation is coterminous with the work he has patronized. He can not be an imbecile.

There are a few more people capable of knowing good art when they see it. Half of them are indifferent, three fourths of them are inactive, the exceeding few side with the artist; about all they can do is to feed him. Others, hating his art, may from family or humanitarian motives, feed and clothe him in spite of his art ... and attempt to divorce him from it.

These statements are simple, dull. One should write them in electric lights and hang them above Coney Island, and beside the Sarsaparilla sign on Broadway! The Biblical Text Society should embellish them upon busses.

Unfortunately the turmoil of yidds, letts, finns, esthonians, cravats, niberians, nubians, algerians, sweeping along Eighth Avenue in the splendour of their vigorous unwashed animality will not help us. They are the America of tomorrow....

(The good Burn believes in America; the naive English, mad over apiculture, horticulture, arboriculture, herbiculture, agriculture, asparagriculture etc., always believe in America ... until they have seen it.)

The turmoil of Yidds, Letts, etc., is “full of promise”, full of vitality. They are the sap of the nation, our heritors, the heritors of our ancient acquisitions. But our job is to turn out good art, that is to produce it, to make a tradition.

“My field must be ploughed up, but the country has need of quiet” (La Famille Cardinal). “I admire Epicurus. He was not the dupe of analogies”. Need I give references for all my quotations?

This nonsense about art for the many, for the majority. J’en ai soupé. It may be fitting that men should enjoy equal “civic and political rights”, these things are a matter of man’s exterior acts, of exterior contacts. (Macchiavelli believed in democracy: it lay beyond his experience). The arts have nothing to do with this. They are man’s life within himself. The king’s writ does not run there. The voice of the majority is powerless to make me enjoy, or disenjoy, the lines of Catullus. I dispense with a vote without inconvenience; Villon I would not dispense with.

Bales are written on the false assumption that you can treat the arts as if they were governed by civic analogies. The two things are not alike, and there is an end to the matter.

It is rubbish to say “art for the people lies behind us”. The populace was paid to attend greek drama. It would have gone to cinemas instead, had cinemas then existed. Art begins with the artist. It goes first to the very few; and, next, to the few very idle. Even journalism and advertising can not reverse this law. I have scribbled a very long letter, and not answered half the good William’s diatribe. My regards to Mrs Amelia.

Yours,
Walter Villerant.

[5] “Imaginary Letters”, by Wyndham Lewis. The Little Review for May.

Robert Alden Sanborn