by Ezra Pound
The second, and to us the dullest of the schools, set to explaining the nature of love and its effects. The normal modern will probably slake all his curiosity for this sort of work in reading one such poem as the King of Navarre’s De Fine amour vient science e beautez. ‘Ingenium nobis ipsa puella fecit’, as Propertius put it, or anglice:
Knowledge and beauty from true love are wrought,
And likewise love is born from this same pair;
These three are one to whomso hath true thought, etc.
There might be less strain if one sang it. This peculiar variety of flame was carried to the altars of Bologna, whence Guinicello sang:
Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore,
Come l’augello in selva alla verdura
And Cavalcanti wrote: ‘A lady asks me, wherefore I wish to speak of an accidentx which is often cruel’, and Dante, following in his elders’ footsteps, the Convito.
The third school is the school of satire, and is the only one which gives us a contact with the normal life of the time. There had been Provençal satire before Piere Cardinal; but the sirventes of Sordello and De Born were directed for the most part against persons, while the Canon of Clermont drives rather against conditions. In so far as Dante is critic of morals, Cardinal must be held as his forerunner. Miquel writes of him as follows:
‘Piere Cardinal was of Veillac of the city Pui Ma Donna, and he was of honourable lineage, son of a knight and a lady. And when he was little his father put him for canon in the canonica major of Puy; and he learnt letters, and he knew well how to read and to sing; and when he was come to man’s estate he had high knowledge of the vanity of this world, for he felt himself gay and fair and young. And he made many fair arguments and fair songs. And he made canzos, but he made only a few of these, and sirventes; and he did best in the said sirventes where he set forth many fine arguments and fair examples for those who understand them; for much he rebuked the folly of this world and much he reproved the false clerks, as his sirventes show. And he went through the courts of kings and of noble barons and took with him his joglar who sang the sirventes. And much was he honoured and welcomed by my lord the good king of Aragon and by honourable barons. And I, master Miquel de la Tour, escriuan (scribe), do ye to wit that N. Piere Cardinal when he passed from this life was nearly a hundred. And I, the aforesaid Miquel, have written these sirventes in the city of Nemze (Nimes) and here are written some of his sirventes.’
If the Vicomtesse de Pena reminds us of certain ladies whom we have met, these sirventes of Cardinal may well remind us that thoughtful men have in every age found almost the same set of things or at least the same sort of things to protest against; if it be not a corrupt press or some monopoly, it is always some sort of equivalent, some conspiracy of ignorance and interest. And thus he says, ‘Li clerc si fan pastor.’ The clerks pretend to be shepherds, but they are wolfish at heart.
If he can find a straight man, it is truly matter for song; and so we hear him say of the Duke of Narbonne, who was apparently, making a fight for honest administration:
Corns raymon duc de Narbona
Marques de proensa
Vostra valors es tan bona
Que tot lo mon gensa,
Quar de la mar de bayona
En tro a valenca
Agra gent falsae fellona
Lai ab vil temensa,
Mas vos tenetz vil lor
Q’n frances bevedor
Plus qua perditz austor
No vos fan temensa.
‘Now is come from France what one did not ask for’—he is addressing the man who is standing against the North—
Count Raymon, Duke of Narbonne,
Marquis of Provence,
Your valour is sound enough
To make up for the cowardice of
All the rest of the gentry.
For from the sea at Bayonne,
Even to Valence,
Folk would have given in (sold out),
But you hold them in scorn,
[Or, reading ‘l’aur’, ‘scorn the gold’.]
So that the drunken French
Alarm you no more
Than a partridge frightens a hawk.
Cardinal is not content to spend himself in mere abuse, like the little tailor Figeira, who rhymes Christ’s ‘mortal pena’ with
Car voletz totzjors portar la borsa plena,
which is one way of saying ‘Judas!’ to the priests. He, Cardinal, sees that the technique of honesty is not always utterly simple.
Li postilh, legat elh cardinal
La cordon tug, y an fag establir
Que qui nos pot de traisson esdir,
which may mean, ‘The pope and the legate and the cardinal have twisted such a cord that they have brought things to such a pass that no one can escape committing treachery.’ As for the rich:
Li ric home an pietat tan gran
Del autre gen quon ac caym da bel.
Que mais volon tolre q lop no fan
E mais mentir que tozas de bordelh.
The rich men have such pity
For other folk—about as much as Cain had for Abel.
For they would like to leave less than the wolves do,
And to lie more than girls in a brothel.
Of the clergy, ‘A tantas vey baylia’, ‘So much the more do I see clerks coming into power that all the world will be theirs, whoever objects. For they’ll have it with taking or with giving’ (i.e. by granting land, belonging to one man, to someone else who will pay allegiance for it, as in the case of De Montfort), ‘or with pardon or with hypocrisy; or by assault or by drinking and eating; or by prayers or by praising the worse; or with God or with devilry.’ We find him putting the age-long query about profit in the following:
He may have enough harness
And sorrel horses and bays;
Tower, wall, and palace,
May he have
—the rich man denying his God.
The stanza runs very smoothly to the end
Si mortz no fos
Elh valgra per un cen
A hundred men he would be worth
Were there no death.
The modern Provençal enthusiast in raptures at the idea of chivalric love (a term which he usually misunderstands), and little concerned with the art of verse, has often failed to notice how finely the sound of Cardinal’s poems is matched with their meaning. There is a lash and sting in his timbre and in his movement. Yet the old man is not always bitter; or, if he is bitter, it is with the bitterness of a torn heart and not a hard one. It is so we find him in the sirvente beginning:
As a man weeps for his son or for his father,
Or for his friend when death has taken him,
So do I mourn for the living who do their own ill,
False, disloyal, felon, and full of ill-fare,
Deceitful, breakers-of-pact,
Cowards, complainers,
Highwaymen, thieves-by-stealth, turn-coats,
Betrayers, and full of treachery,
Here where the devil reigns
And teaches them to act thus.
He is almost the only singer of his time to protest against the follies of war. As here:
Ready for war, as night is to follow the sun,
Readier for it than is the fool to be cuckold
When he has first plagued his wife!
And war is an ill thing to look upon,
And I know that there is not one man drawn into it
But his child, or his cousin or someone akin to him
Prays God that it be given over.
He says plainly, in another place, that the barons make war for their own profit, regardless of the peasants. ‘Fai mal senher vas los sieu.’ His sobriety is not to be fooled with sentiment either martial or otherwise. There is in him little of the fashion of feminolatry, and the gentle reader in search of trunk-hose and the light guitar had better go elsewhere. As for women: ‘L’una fai drut.’
One turn
s leman for the sake of great possessions;
And another because poverty is killing her,
And one hasn’t even a shift of coarse linen;
And another has two and does likewise.
And one gets an old man—and she is a young wench,
And the old woman gives the man an elixir.
As for justice, there is little now: ‘If a rich man steal by chicanery, he will have right before Constantine (i.e. by legal circumambience) but the poor thief may go hang.’ And after this there is a passage of pity and of irony fine-drawn as much of his work is, for he keeps the very formula that De Born had used in his praise of battle, ‘Belh mes quan vey’; and, perhaps, in Sir Bertrans’ time even the Provençal wars may have seemed more like a game, and may have appeared to have some element of sport and chance in them. But the twelfth century had gone, and the spirit of the people was weary, and the old canon’s passage may well serve as a final epitaph on all that remained of silk thread and cisclatons, of viol and gai saber.
Never agin shall we see the Easter come in so fairly,
That was wont to come in with pleasure and with song,
No! but we see it arrayed with alarms and excursions,
Arrayed with war and dismay and fear,
Arrayed with troops and with cavalcades,
Oh, yes, it’s a fine sight to see holder and shepherd
Going so wretched that they know not where they are
THE SERIOUS ARTIST
I
It is curious that one should be asked to rewrite Sidney’s Defence of Poesy in the year of grace 1913. During the intervening centuries, and before them, other centres of civilization had decided that good art was a blessing and that bad art was criminal, and they had spent some time and thought in trying to find means whereby to distinguish the true art from the sham. But in England now, in the age of Gosse as in the age of Gosson we are asked if the arts are moral. We are asked to define the relation of the arts to economics, we are asked what position the arts are to hold in the ideal republic. And it is obviously the opinion of many people less objectionable than the Sydney Webbs1 that the arts had better not exist at all.
I take no great pleasure in writing prose about æasthetic. I think one work of art is worth forty prefaces and as many apologiæ. Nevertheless I have been questioned earnestly and by a person certainly of good will. It is as if one said to me: what is the use of open spaces in this city, what is the use of rose-trees and why do you wish to plant trees and lay out parks and gardens? There are some who do not take delight in these things. The rose springs fairest from some buried Cæasar’s throat and the dogwood with its flower of four petals (our dogwood, not the tree you call by that name) is grown from the heart of Aucassin, 2 or perhaps this is only fancy. Let us pursue the matter in ethic.
It is obvious that ethics are based on the nature of man, just as it is obvious that civics are based upon the nature of men when living together in groups.
It is obvious that the good of the greatest number cannot be attained until we know in some sort of what that good must consist. In other words we must know what sort of an animal man is, before we can contrive his maximum happiness, or before we can decide what percentage of that happiness he can have without causing too great a percentage of unhappiness to those about him.
The arts, literature, poesy, are a science, just as chemistry is a science. Their subject is man, mankind and the individual. The subject of chemistry is matter considered as to its composition.
The arts give us a great percentage of the lasting and unassailable data regarding the nature of man, of immaterial man, of man considered as a thinking and sentient creature. They begin where the science of medicine leaves off or rather they overlap that science. The borders of the two arts overcross.
From medicine we learn that man thrives best when duly washed, aired and sunned. From the arts we learn that man is whimsical, that one man differs from another. That men differ among themselves as leaves upon trees differ. That they do not resemble each other as do buttons cut by machine.
From the arts also we learn in what ways man resembles and in what way he differs from certain other animals. We learn that certain men are often more akin to certain animals than they are to other men of different composition. We learn that all men do not desire the same things and that it would therefore be inequitable to give to all men two acres and a cow.
It would be manifestly inequitable to treat the ostrich and the polar bear in the same fashion, granted that it is not unjust to have them pent up where you can treat them at all.
An ethic based on a belief that men are different from what they are is manifestly stupid. It is stupid to apply such an ethic as it is to apply laws and morals designed for a nomadic tribe, or for a tribe in the state of barbarism, to a people crowded into the slums of a modern metropolis. Thus in the tribe it is well to beget children, for the more strong male children you have in the tribe the less likely you are to be bashed on the head by males of the neighbouring tribes, and the more female children the more rapidly the tribe will increase. Conversely it is a crime rather worse than murder to beget children in a slum, to beget children for whom no fitting provision is made, either as touching their physical or economic wellbeing. The increase not only afflicts the child born but the increasing number of the poor keeps down the wage. On this count the bishop of London, as an encourager of this sort of increase, is a criminal of a type rather lower and rather more detestable than the souteneur.
I cite this as one example of inequity persisting because of a continued refusal to consider a code devised for one state of society, in its (the code’s) relation to a different state of society. It is as if, in physics or engineering, we refused to consider a force designed to affect one mass, in its relation (i.e. the force’s) to another mass wholly differing, or in some notable way differing, from the first mass.
As inequities can exist because of refusals to consider the actualities of a law in relation to a social condition, so can inequities exist through refusal to consider the actualities of the composition of the masses, or of the individuals to which they are applied.
If all men desired above everything else two acres and a cow, obviously the perfect state would be that state which gave to each man two acres and a cow.
If any science save the arts were able more precisely to determine what the individual does not actually desire, then that science would be of more use in providing the data for ethics.
In the like manner, if any sciences save medicine and chemistry were more able to determine what things were compatible with physical wellbeing, then those sciences would be of more value for providing the data of hygiene.
This brings us to the immorality of bad art. Bad art is inaccurate art. It is art that makes false reports. If a scientist falsifies a report either deliberately or through negligence we consider him as either a criminal or a bad scientist according to the enormity of his offence, and he is punished or despised accordingly.
If he falsifies the reports of a maternity hospital in order to retain his position and get profit and advancement from the city board, he may escape detection. If he declines to make such falsification he may lose financial rewards, and in either case his baseness or his pluck may pass unknown and unnoticed save by a very few people. Nevertheless one does not have to argue his case. The layman knows soon enough on hearing it whether the physician is to be blamed or praised.
If an artist falsifies his report as to the nature of man, as to his own nature, as to the nature of his ideal of the perfect, as to the nature of his ideal of this, that or the other, of god, if god exist, of the life force, of the nature of good and evil, if good and evil exist, of the force with which he believes or disbelieves this, that or the other, of the degree in which he suffers or is made glad; if the artist falsifies his reports on these matters or on any other matter in order that he may conform to the taste of his time, to the proprieties of a sovereign, to the conveniences of
a preconceived code of ethics, then that artist lies. If he lies out of deliberate will to lie, if he lies out of carelessness, out of laziness, out of cowardice, out of any sort of negligence whatsoever, he nevertheless lies and he should be punished or despised in proportion to the seriousness of his offence. His offence is of the same nature as the physician’s and according to his position and the nature of his lie he is responsible for future oppressions and for future misconceptions. Albeit his lies are known to only a few, or his truth-telling to only a few. Albeit he may pass without censure for one and without praise for the other. Albeit he can only be punished on the plane of his crime and by nothing save the contempt of those who know of his crime. Perhaps it is caddishness rather than crime. However there is perhaps nothing worse for a man than to know that he is a cur and to know that someone else, if only one person, knows it.
We distinguish very clearly between the physician who is doing his best for a patient, who is using drugs in which he believes, or who is in a wilderness, let us say, where the patient can get no other medical aid. We distinguish, I say, very clearly between the failure of such a physician, and the act of that physician, who ignorant of the patient’s disease, being in reach of more skilful physicians, deliberately denies an ignorance of which he is quite conscious, refuses to consult other physicians, tries to prevent the patient’s having access to more skilful physicians, or deliberately tortures the patient for his own ends.