Early Writings

by Ezra Pound

  Behind the narratives is a comparatively simple state of “romanticism,” behind the canzos, the “love code.”

  One or two theories as to its inner significance may in some way promote an understanding of the period.

  The “chivalric love,” was, as I understand it, an art, that is to say, a religion. The writers of “trobar clus”2 did not seek obscurity for the sake of obscurity.

  An art is vital only so long as it is interpretative, so long, that is, as it manifests something which the artist perceives at greater intensity, and more intimately, than his public. If he be the seeing man among the sightless, they will attend him only so long as his statements seem, or are proven, true. If he forsake this honor of interpreting, if he speak for the pleasure of hearing his own voice, they may listen for a while to the babble and to the sound of the painted words, but there comes, after a little, a murmur, a slight stirring, and then that condition which we see about us, disapproved as the “divorce of art and life.”

  The interpretive function is the highest honor of the arts, and because it is so we find that a sort of hyper-scientific precision is the touchstone and assay of the artist’s power, of his honor, his authenticity. Constantly he must distinguish between the shades and the degrees of the ineffable.

  If we apply this test, first, as to the interpretive intention on the part of the artist, second, as to the exactness of presentation, we shall find that the Divina Commedia is a single elaborated metaphor of life; it is an accumulation of fine discriminations arranged in orderly sequence. It makes no difference in kind whether the artist treat of heaven and hell, of paradise upon earth and of the elysian enamelled fields beneath it, or of Love appearing in an ash-grey vision, or of the seemingly slight matter of birds and branches ... through one and the other of all these, there is to the artist a like honorable opportunity for precision, for that precision through which alone can any of these matters take on their immortality.

  “Magna pars mei,” says Horace, speaking of his own futurity, “that in me which is greatest shall escape dissolution”: The accurate artist seems to leave not only his greater self, but beside it, upon the films of his art, some living print of the circumvolving man, his taste, his temper and his foible—of the things about which he felt it never worth his while to bother other people by speaking, the things he forgot for some major interest; of these, and of another class of things, things that his audience would have taken for granted; or thirdly, of things about which he had, for some reason or other, a reticence. We find these not so much in the words—which anyone may read—but in the subtle joints of the craft, in the crannies perceptible only to the craftsman.

  Such is the record left us by a man whom Dante found “best verse-wright in the fostering tongue,” the lingua materna, Provençal Langue d’Oc; and in that affectionate epithet, materna, we have a slight evidence of the regard in which this forgotten speech was held by the Tuscan poets, both for its sound and for its matter.

  We find this poetry divided into two schools; the first school complained about the obscurities of the second—we have them always with us. They claimed, or rather jeered in Provence, remonstrated in Tuscany, wrangle today, and will wrangle tomorrow—and not without some show of reason—that poetry, especially lyric poetry, must be simple; that you must get the meaning while the man sings it. This school had, and has always, the popular ear. The other school culminated in Dante Alighieri. There is, of course, ample room for both schools. The ballad-concert ideal is correct, in its own way. A song is a thing to sing. If you approach the canzoni of the second school with this bias you will be disappointed, not because their sound or form is not as lyric as that of the canzoni of the first school, but because they are not always intelligible at first hearing. They are good art as the high mass is good art. The first songs are apt to weary you after you know them; they are especially tiresome if one tries to read them after one has read fifty others of more or less the same sort.

  The second sort of canzone is a ritual. It must be conceived and approached as ritual. It has its purpose and its effect. These are different from those of simple song. They are perhaps subtler. They make their revelations to those who are already expert.

  Apart from Arnaut’s3 aesthetic merits, his position in the history of poetry, etc., his music, the fineness of his observation and of his perceptive senses, there is a problem of meaning.

  The crux of the matter might seem to rest on a very narrow base; it might seem to be a matter of taste or of opinion, of scarcely more than a personal predilection to ascribe or not to ascribe to one passage in the canzon “Doutz brais e critz,” a visionary significance, where, in the third stanza, he speaks of a castle, a dream-castle, or otherwise—as you like—and says of the “lady”:

  She made me a shield, extending over me her fair mantle of indigo, so that the slanderers might not see this.

  This may be merely a conceit, a light and pleasant phrase; if we found it in Herrick or Decker,4 or some minor Elizabethan, we might well consider it so, and pass without further ado. If one consider it as historical, the protection offered the secret might seem inadequate. I have, however, no quarrel with those who care to interpret the passage in either of these more obvious and, to me, less satisfactory ways.

  We must, however, take into our account a number of related things; consider, in following the clue of a visionary interpretation, whether it will throw light upon events and problems other than our own, and weigh the chances in favor of, or against, this interpretation. Allow for climate, consider the restless sensitive temper of our jongleur, and the quality of the minds which appreciated him. Consider what poetry was to become, within less than a century, at the hands of Guinicelli,5 or of “il nostro Guido” in such a poem as the ballata, ending: “Vedrai la sua virtù nel ciel salita,”g and consider the whole temper of Dante’s verse. In none of these things singly is there any specific proof. Consider the history of the time, the Albigensian Crusade, nominally against a sect tinged with Manichean heresy, and remember how Provençal song is never wholly disjunct from pagan rites of May Day. Provence was less disturbed than the rest of Europe by invasion from the North in the darker ages; if paganism survived anywhere it would have been, unofficially, in the Langue d’Oc. That the spirit was, in Provence, Hellenic is seen readily enough by anyone who will compare the Greek Anthology with the work of the troubadours. They have, in some way, lost the names of the gods and remembered the names of lovers. Ovid and The Eclogues of Virgil would seem to have been their chief documents.

  The question: Did this “close ring,” this aristocracy of emotion, evolve, out of its half memories of Hellenistic mysteries, a cult—a cult stricter, or more subtle, than that of the celibate ascetics, a cult for the purgation of the soul by a refinement of, and lordship over, the senses? Consider in such passages in Arnaut as, “E quel remir contral lums de la lampa,” whether a sheer love of beauty and a delight in the perception of it have not replaced all heavier emotion, whether or no the thing has not become a function of the intellect. h

  Some mystic or other speaks of the intellect as standing in the same relation to the soul as do the senses to the mind; and beyond a certain border, surely we come to this place where the ecstasy is not a whirl or a madness of the senses, but a glow arising from the exact nature of the perception. We find a similar thought in Spinoza where he says that “the intellectual love of a thing consists in the understanding of its perfections,” and adds “all creatures whatsoever desire this love.”

  If a certain number of people in Provence developed their own unofficial mysticism, basing it for the most part on their own experience, if the servants of Amor saw visions quite as well as the servants of the Roman ecclesiastical hierarchy, if they were, moreover, troubled with no “dark night of the soul,” and the kindred incommodities of ascetic yoga, this may well have caused some scandal and jealousy to the orthodox. If we find a similar mode of thought in both devotions, we find a like similarity in the sec
ular and sacred music. “Alba” was probably sung to “Hallelujah’s” melody. Many of the troubadours, in fact nearly all who knew letters or music, had been taught in the monasteries (St. Martial, St. Leonard and the other abbeys of Limoges). Visions and the doctrines of the early Fathers could not have been utterly strange to them. The rise of Mariolatry, its pagan lineage, the romance of it, find modes of expression which verge over-easily into the speech and casuistry of Our Lady of Cyprus, as we may see in Arnaut, as we see so splendidly in Guido’s “Una figura della donna miae.” And there is the consummation of it all in Dante’s glorification of Beatrice. There is the inexplicable address to the lady in the masculine. There is the final evolution of Amor by Guido and Dante, a new and paganish god, neither Eros nor an angel of the Talmud.

  I believe in a sort of permanent basis in humanity, that is to say, I believe that Greek myth arose when someone having passed through delightful psychic experience tried to communicate it to others and found it necessary to screen himself from persecution. Speaking aesthetically, the myths are explications of mood: you may stop there, or you may probe deeper. Certain it is that these myths are only intelligible in a vivid and glittering sense to those people to whom they occur. I know, I mean, one man who understands Persephone and Demeter, and one who understands the Laurel, and another who has, I should say, met Artemis. These things are for them real.

  Let us consider the body as pure mechanism. Our kinship to the ox we have constantly thrust upon us; but beneath this is our kinship to the vital universe, to the tree and the living rock, and, because this is less obvious—and possibly more interesting—we forget it.

  We have about us the universe of fluid force, and below us the germinal universe of wood alive, of stone alive. Man is—the sensitive physical part of him-a mechanism, for the purpose of our further discussion a mechanism rather like an electric appliance, switches, wires, etc. Chemically speaking, he is ut credo, a few buckets of water, tied up in a complicated sort of fig-leaf. As to his consciousness, the consciousness of some seems to rest, or to have its 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. And with certain others their consciousness is “germinal.” Their thoughts are in them as the thought of the tree is in the seed, or in the grass, or the grain, or the blossom. And these minds are the more poetic, and they affect mind about them, and transmute it as the seed the earth. And this latter sort of mind is close on the vital universe; and the strength of the Greek beauty rests in this, that it is ever at the interpretation of this vital universe, by its signs of gods and godly attendants and oreads.

  In the Trecento6 the Tuscans are busy with their phantastikon. In Provence we may find preparation for this, or we may find faint reliqua of the other consciousness; though one misses the pantheon. Line after line of Arnaut will repeat from Sappho, but the whole seems curiously barren if we turn suddenly from the Greek to it.

  After the Trecento we get Humanism,i and as the art is carried northward we have Chaucer and Shakespeare, (Jacques-pere). Man is concerned with man and forgets the whole and the flowing. And we have in sequence, first the age of drama, and then the age of prose. At any rate, when we do get into contemplation of the flowing we find sex, or some correspondance to it, “positive and negative,” “North and South,” “sun and moon,” or whatever terms of whatever cult or science you prefer to substitute.

  For the particular parallel I wish to indicate, our handiest illustrations are drawn from physics: ist, the common electric machine, the glass disc and rotary brushes; 2nd, the wireless telegraph receiver. In the first we generate a current, or if you like, split up a static condition of things and produce a tension. This is focussed on two brass knobs or “poles.” These are first in contact, and after the current is generated we can gradually widen the distance between them, and a spark will leap across it, the wider the stronger, until with the ordinary sized laboratory appliance it will leap over or around a large obstacle or pierce a heavy book cover. In the telegraph we have a charged surface—produced in a cognate manner—attracting to it, or registering movements in the invisible aether.

  Substituting in these equations a more complex mechanism and a possibly subtler form of energy is, or should be, simple enough. I have no dogma, but the figures may serve as an assistance to thought.

  It is an ancient hypothesis that the little cosmos “corresponds” to the greater, that man has in him both “sun” and “moon.” From this I should say that there are at least two paths—I do not say that they lead to the same place—the one ascetic, the other for want of a better term “chivalric.” In the first the monk or whoever he may be, develops, at infinite trouble and expense, the secondary pole within himself, produces his charged surface which registers the beauties, celestial or otherwise, by “contemplation.” In the second, which I must say seems more in accord with “mens sana in corpore sano” the charged surface is produced between the predominant natural poles of two human mechanisms.

  Sex is, that is to say, of a double function and purpose, reproductive and educational; or, as we see in the realm of fluid force, one sort of vibration produces at different intensities, heat and light. No scientist would be so stupid as to affirm that heat produced light, and it is into a similar sort of false ratiocination that those writers fall who find the source of illumination, or of religious experience, centred solely in the philo-progenitive instinct.

  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?

  For our basis in nature we rest on the indisputable and very scientific fact that there are in the “normal course of things” certain times, a certain sort of moment more than another when a man feels his immortality upon him. As for the effect of this phenomenon in Provence, before coming to any judgment upon it we should consider carefully the history of the various cults or religions of orgy and of ecstasy, from the simpler Bacchanalia to the more complicated rites of Isis or Dionysus—sudden rise and equally sudden decline. The corruptions of their priesthoods follow, probably, the admission thereto of one neophyte who was not properly “sacerdos.”

  There are, as we see, only two kinds of religion. There is the Mosaic or Roman or British Empire type, where someone, having to keep a troublesome rabble in order, invents and scares them with a disagreeable bogie, which he calls god.

  Christianity and all other forms of ecstatic religion, on the other hand, are not in inception dogma or propaganda of something called the one truth or the universal truth; they seem little concerned with ethics; their general object appears to be to stimulate a sort of confidence in the life-force. Their teaching is variously and constantly a sort of working hypothesis acceptable to people of a certain range of temperament—a “regola” which suits a particular constitution of nerves and intellect, and in accord with which the people of this temperament can live at greatest peace with “the order,” with man and nature. The old cults were sane in their careful inquisition or novitiate, which served to determine whether the candidates were or were not of such temper and composition.

  One must consider that the types which joined these cults survived, in Provence, and survive, today—priests, maenads and the rest—though there is in our society no provision for them.

  I have no particular conclusion to impose upon the reader; for a due consideration of Provencal poetry in “trobar clus,” I can only suggest the evidence and lines of inquiry. The Pauline position on wedlock is of importance—I do not mean its general and inimical disapproval, but its more specific utterances. Whatever one may think of the pagan survivals in Mariolatry or of the cult of virginity, it is certain that nothing exists
without due cause or causes. The language of the Christian mystics concerning the “bride” and the rest of it; the ancient ideas of union with the god, or with Queen Isis—all these, as “atmospheric influences,” must be weighed; together with the testimony of the arts, and their progression of content.

  In Catullus’ superb epithalamium “Collis O Heliconii,” we find the affair is strictly on one plane; the bride is what she is in Morocco today, and the function is “normal” and eugenic. It is the sacrificial concept. Yet Catullus, recording his own emotion, could say: “More as a father than a lover.” Propertius writes: “Ingenium nobis ipsa puella fecit.”

  Christianity had, one might say, brought in the mystic note; but this would be much too sweeping. Anatole France, in his commentary on Horace’s “Tu ne quaesaris,” has told us a good deal about the various Oriental cults thronging the Eternal City. At Marseille the Greek settlement was very ancient. How much of the Roman tone, or the Oriental mode, went out from Rome to the Roman country houses which were the last hold of culture, we can hardly say; and from the end of the Sixth Century until the beginning of the Twelfth there is supposed to be little available evidence. At least we are a fair distance from Catullus when we come to Peire Vidal’s: “Good Lady, I think I see God when I gaze on your delicate body.”

  You may take this if you like cum grano. Vidal was confessedly erratic. Still it is an obvious change from the manner of the Roman classics, and it cannot be regarded as a particularly pious or Christian expression. If this state of mind was fostered by the writings of the early Christian Fathers, we must regard their influence as purely indirect and unintentional.

  Richard St. Victor has left us one very beautiful passage on the splendors of paradise.

  They are ineffable and innumerable and no man having beheld them can fittingly narrate them or even remember them exactly. Nevertheless by naming over all the most beautiful things we know we may draw back upon the mind some vestige of the heavenly splendor.