pddf.txt


A BC OF ECONOMICS
And old type of mentality asks whether this would maintain the
said individual's sense of responsibility, and answers the question very
emphatically in the negative.
I fall back on a profession of faith. The simplest starting-point appears
to me to be the individual's willingness to work four hours a day
between the ages of twenty and forty.
There are doubtless, in modern industry, various directive jobs, etc.,
that need more prolonged attention, but very few in which an equiva-
lent stint would not serve. Ten years at eight hours a day, as propor-
tionate,
Counting money as certificate of work done, the simplest means of
keeping money distributed (in legal-tender credit-slips) is to keep
work distributed. I do not say it is the only conceivable means, but I
definitely assert that it is the most available means, the simplest, the
one requiring least bureaucracy and supervision and interference.
As for over-time.
Let it mean over-time. Let the man work four hours for pay, and if
he still wants to work after that, let him work as any artist or poet
works, let him embellish his home or his garden, or stretch his legs
in some form of exercise, or crook his back over a pool-table or sit
on his ramp and smoke. He would get a great deal more out of life,
and, supposing him to have any rudiments of intelligence, he would
be infinitely more likely to use it and let it grow, and in any case he
would ‘get a great deal more for his money’.
I know, not from theory but from practice, that you can live in-
finitely better with a very little money and a lot of spare time, than
with more money and less time. Time is not money, but it is almost
everything else.
Even suppose that the wage for a four-hour day should be ‘cut’ to
half the wage of an eight-hour day (which is for various simple reasons
unnecessary), but even supposing it were necessary and were done.
The man on that wage, once he were assured of its continuance, once
he had ‘arranged his life’ in accordance, and organised his other four
hours for private activity, could have a damn sight better life than he
now gets.
I say ‘which is for various reasons unnecessary’ because the ‘wage’ is
now measured in currency which is merely a convention, and a bit of
paper with 10 on it is no more difficult to provide than a bit of paper
with 5 or with 20.
There are various credit schemes which could take care of the prob-
lem of leaving the figure 10 on the bit of paper, even though the day’s
work were cut in half.
Douglas would pass out slips to the middleman. I have outlined
a scheme for passing them out via the factory. Neither scheme is
241

CIVILIZATION, MONEY AND HISTORY
necessary. A few months ago the German government proposed
an inflation without, apparently, any control.
‘The ‘need’ of such a scheme is possibly due more to the strength of
habits of mind, to conventionality in the populace’s thoughts about
money, than to anything else.
Freedom from worry, inherent in the reasonable certainty of
keeping one’s job, must be worth at least 25 per cent of any in-
come,
nore that this reasonable certainty can only exist when the necessity
of progressively shortening the working day, pari passu with mechanical
invention, is generally recognised.
No arbitrary number of hours set for 1933 will be valid in 1987, let
alone in 2043.
Over and above which we come upon Major Douglas's equations
re—superstition in costing.
PART THREE
I don't quite see how anyone is going to dodge (for ever) the Major’s
equations.
‘There are various verbal manifestations and various terminologies
and various approaches to the problem.
[have begun with distribution of work. A point at which the Doug-
lasites dislike to begin. 1 have gone on to the demand for justice in
the distribution of credit slips, but that does not invalidate the Major's
contention that under the present system there are never enough credit
slips to deal with the product; to distribute the product; to purchase
the product; to conjugate any of the necessary verbs of sane econo-
mics or of a decent and agreeable life.
The Major has pointed out the superstition in the computation of
costs. The reader can look up the details in a number of contemporary
works.
He will not find a simpler statement than Douglas's: You pay for the
tree every time you buy a bit of the fruit.
Obviously the tree has to be maintained, some fraction over and
above the worth of the fruit must be added, but the computation of
that fraction can and should be free from gross error.
Gross error here could undoubtedly undo the good effects ofa short
working day. As a patient may easily die of one disease after you have
cured him of another.
The requirements so far on our list are:
(1) ‘Money’ as certificate of work done.
(2) ‘Work done’ to be in a sense ‘inside a system’, that is to say, it
must be ‘necessary’ or at any rate it must be work that someone WANTS
242

A BC OF ECONOMICS
done. The product must be what someone lacks. [sic]-I lack half a loaf
of bread daily or thereabouts. I lack a few suits of clothes per
annum, etc.
(3) There must be some way for everyone to get enough money or
common-carrier to satisfy a reasonable number of lacks.
The simplest road is via work, and I suspect any other, This is also the
first instinctive outcry. It is empirically observable that the first thing
men ask for is work; and only after refusal do they cry out for free
food. If this statement indicates a great naive trust in humanity I am
willing to stand the charge.
(4) Fairness in the issuance of certificates. (I think the various
Douglas plans fall mainly under this heading.)
Time is Not Money
Time is not money, but it is nearly everything else. That is to say... .
It is not money, food, raw materials, women or various fundamental
necessities which I cannot at the moment remember, including pos-
sibly health, but it is a very important lever to most of them.
‘Nobody, but socialists’, reads Marx, and there is consequently little
enlightened discussion of either his history or his ‘errors’,
I havenever, sofaras! can recall, seen acontemporary recognition of
the plain fact that a man with a lot of spare time can get a great deal
more out of life with a very little money, than an overworked man
with a great deal. I mean apart from polyana.
Leisure is not gained by simply being out of work. Leisure is spare
time free from anxiety,
Any spare time not absolutely obsessed by worry can be made the
means to a ‘better life’.
Marx deals with goods in the shop window or the shop basement.
The minute I cook my own dinner or make the chair that I sit on I
escape from the whole cycle of Marxian economics. In consideration
of which fact I remain a Jeffersonian republican, and I believe the
present troubles, or at any rate the present U.S. American or English
troubles, can be treated from a Jeffersonian angle.
You can throw in Confucius and Van Buren, but you must dis-
tinguish between 1820 and 1930, you must bring your Jefferson up to
date. T. J, had already seen that agriculture would in great measure
give way to manufacturing, ete.
~ All American and republican principles were lost during the damn-
able reign of the infamous Woodrow, but even Woodrow did not
favour the xvitt amendment. Despite ‘liberty unions’, etc., it is almost
impossible to discover any sense of American principles in contempor-
ary American writing, apart from editorials in one or two newspapers
which naturally are not read by highbrows.
One commissioner of labour whose name I have forgotten, did
243

CIVILIZATION, MONEY AND HISTORY
definitely advocate a shorter working day. No one has raised any
coherent or even publicly avowable objection.
No one has ventured to say that a shorter day would not decrease
the number of totally unemployed.
No one has claimed that it would lead to the creation of more
‘bureaus’ and more bureaucrats, and more sassy typists to take notes
of vacuous commissioners and sit on their obese laps in government
offices.
Naturally there is no very clear outcry for shorter hours from the
workmen themselves. The labour party in America is not rich in
economists. You can’t arouse any very fiery passion on the bare plea
of less work. It spells less pay to most hearers,
By simple extensions of credit (paper credit) it would probably be
possible to leave the nominal pay exactly where it is, but it requires
an almost transcendent comprehension of credit to understand this.
The plain man cannot in any way comprehend that the accelerated
movement of money when everybody has a little means greater com-
fort than the constipated state of things when a lot of people have
none.
The fiery labourite wants the unemployed paid out of the rich man’s
pocket. The rich man’s pocket happens to be a mere pipe and not an
inexhaustible upspringing fountain.
Naturally all men desire to pass the buck. The immediate effect of
distributing work, under the present system, means that working men
would have to divide with working men. It cannot, therefore, be a
very popular cause.
The benefits of a shorter day would be diffused, everyone would in a
few months receive them, but it would take probably longer to rer—
ceive them, Annoyances strike more quickly than comforts.
Tell any man that he can live better on 40 shillings a week and an
extra two hours per day to himself, than he can on 50 shillings without
the two hours and see how little he believes you.
The idea that prices would come down sounds like a pipe dream,
Prices have always adjusted themselves to the current spending
powers of the general public, but that again is a general idea.
Two hours more per day to loaf, to think, to keep fit by exercise of
a different set of muscles, as distinct from overwork and the spectacle
of several millions in idleness... !
Tam an expert. I have lived nearly all my life, at any rate all my adult
life, among the unemployed. All the arts have been unemployed in
my time.
Free Trade
Free Trade might be possible between two countries if they had for
each other a full and wholly enlightened good will,
244

A B C OF ECONOMICS
provided they had first attained an almost perfect adjustment of
their own internal affairs.
It need hardly be said that for the last century or more, the practice
of governments has been to neglect internal economy; to commit
every conceivable villainy, devilry and idiocy and to employ foreign
affairs, conquests, dumpings, exploitations as a means of distracting
attention from conditions at home, or to use the spoils of savages as
palliatives to domestic sores or in producing an eyewash of ‘prosper-
ity’, In the sense that such prosperity is useful as ‘bait’; as spectacular
fortunes; as ‘the chance’ of getting rich.
Malthus
In practice it has been shown that families who do not overproduce,
that is, who beget no more children than they can support, have been
able to maintain decent standards of living, and that other families do
not.
It is probably useless to propound theories of perfect government
or of perfect economics for human beings who are too demnition
stupid and too ignorant to acquire so rudimentary a perception of
cause and effect.
Objections to this system are raised and are conceivably raisable on
the score of national greatness, etc. ... Nevertheless we are told that
Holland has maintained decent standards of living, etc., by not over
populating herself. The system is supposed (for wholly arcane rea-
sons) to work for a small nation and not for a large.
It would work. The only objection to it is that curtailment of the
philoprogenitive instinct may not be necessary. Or possibly on practi-
cal grounds, that the present state of bigotry and idiocy prevent the
curtailment, and that the inadequate progress of education is not
able to achieve it. Yet sparsely populated districts are not necessarily
the most prosperous. The remedy is to be recommended only at close
range for the individual family living in a bad economic system. It
cannot be made the backbone of enlightened economics on the grand
scale. Such economics, now, being little more than a study of how we
can USE our resources, not how we can refrain from employing them.
Until we have decent economics the sane man will refuse to over-
breed. And pity for the large poor family will continue to be pity for
idiotic lack of prevision.
It may be that all, or most, sciences start from suffering or from pity;
but once a science is started these emotions have no place in that
science.
Give a people an almost perfect government, and in two generations
they will let it run to rot from sheer laziness (vide the U.S.A. where not
one person in ten exercises his rights and not one person in ten
thousand has the faintest idea of the aims and ambitions of the
245

CIVILIZATION, MONEY AND HISTORY
country’s great founders and lawmakers. Their dung has covered their
heads.). s
It is nevertheless one’s duty to try to think out a sane economics,
and to try to enforce it by that most violent of all means, the attempt-
ing to make people think.
Proof of this last statement is very obscure, I suppose the only
warrant for it is the capacity to think and the sense of obligation
thereby conferred.
Self-Help
The foregoing is not mere nihilism, or mere in-vain-ism or mere
quietism, nor is it so far off the subject as it might seem; the point is
that No one in any society has the right to blame his troubles on any
one else, Liberals and liberal thought so-called have been a mess of
mush because of this unacknowledged assumption, and a tendency
to breed this state of mind.
The law of nature is that the animal must either adapt itself to en-
vironment or overcome that environment-soft life and decadence.
Decline of the American type, often bewailed! First the pioneer,
then the boob and the soft-head! Flooding of peasant type, without
peasant perseverance and peasant patience in face of low return!
Ability to think, part of the adaptation to environment!
Laziness of whole generations! All the back-bone of Jefferson's
thought and of Van Buren’s forgotten! Benefits of the latter, lost
in civil war and post civil war finance!
All of which is not wholly alien to my subject.
All questions of how measures can be taken, how enforced, are
questions of politics,
ECONOMICS is concerned with determining wHat financial measures,
what methods or regulations of trade, ete., must be taken, or can most
advantageously be taken or decreed by government whatever its
nature, or by whatever elected or haphazard or private or dictatorial
bodies or individuals control trade, credit, money, etc,
Certain things are wise, let us say, for the governors of the Bank of
England (a private corporation) and wise for the U.S. Federal Board,
appointed by an elected president, and would be equally wise or equally
foolish for a body directly elected by the people.
England, as we have remarked, gave herself to a gang of bankers
ages ago. No one remembers why. It is no concern of a foreigner.
The British wished it or at least some British wished it, and now the
rest don't, apparently, mind.
All these things are part of politics. Economics is concerned with
what should be done, not with how you are going to get a controlling
group of men to carry out an idea; but with the idea, with the proper
equations, As you might say the Baldwin Locomotive Works are con-
246

A BC OF ECONOMICS
cerned with making engines that will pull trains, not with which
direction they are to run.
Good economics are as sound for Russia as for the U.S.A.
There may even be several economic solutions to any problem. Gasoline and coal
both serve as fuel.
PART FOUR
Politics, A Necessary Digression
Science or no science an economic system or lack-of-system is bound
to be affected by the political system in which or beside which it
exists, and more especially by the preconceptions or prejudices or pre-
dispositions and attitudes implied in the political system.
The preconception of democracy, let us say at its best, democracy
as it existed in the minds of Jefferson and Van Buren, is that the best
men, kaloikagathoi, etc., Witt. TAKE THE TROUBLE to place their ideas and
policies before the majority with such clarity and persuasiveness that
the majority will accept their guidance, i.e. ‘be right’.
The preconception of let us say the Adamses, or aristodemocratic
parties is that privilege, a little of it, will breed a sense of responsibility.
The further Toryism is that the best should be served.
In practice it is claimed that the best get tired or fail to exert them-
selves to the necessary degree.
It seems fairly proved that privilege does Nor breed a sense of re—
sponsibility. Individuals, let us say exceptional individuals in privi-
leged classes, maintain the sense of responsibility, but the general ruck,
namely 95 per cent of all privileged classes, seem to believe that the
main use of privileges is to be exempt from responsibility, from respon-
sibilities of every possible kind.
This is as true of financial privilege as of political privilege.
The apparent exception seems to occur at the birth of any new
privileged class, which amounts to saying that any new governing
class is bound to be composed of exceptional men, or at any rate of
men having more energy and being therefore more fit (apt) to govern
than their fellows.
The dross of the intelligentsia, lacking the force to govern, con-
stantly try to spread the belief that Tiny are the ‘best’, the agathoi,
ete.
Obviously no best, no even good, governing class can be spineless;
this applies even to an administrative class, or people administering
economics. The term ‘good’ in either case must include a capacity
for action; some sense of relation between action and mere thought
or talk.
A lot of rot is talked and written on the assumption of political and
economic laws existing in vacuo.
1 go on writing because it appears to me that no thoughtful man
can in our time avoid trying to arrange those things in his own mind
247

CIVILIZATION, MONEY AND HISTORY
in an orderly fashion, or shirk coming to conclusions about them, i.e.
as man living perforce among other men, affected by their actions,
and by his aang them.
To separate ideas that are not identical and to determine their
relations.
As to the history of the subject, a fig for that history save in so far
as it applies to the present and to the day after tomorrow.
A democracy, the majority which ‘decides’ in a democracy function-
ing as such, would presumably choose sound economics shortly after
it had learned to distinguish the sound from the unsound. Subjects of
an autocrat would obey, and continue obeying the economic decisions
of their ruler or rulers as long as the orders were economically sound,
and for a considerable period after those orders were unsound.
Various durations of patience in intermediate forms of government.
A break, revolution, chaos, need not imply any new discovery or
ambition or new form of soundness; it is, nevertheless, usually en-
gineered in the name of some form of justice, or some social belief
with economic implications.
The point is that the orders of an omniscient despot and of an
intelligent democracy would be very much alike in so far as they
affected the main body of the country’s economics. Whether as in-
dependent citizens, individuals, etc., or as pack animals, the nutrition
of the population would have its importance.
For any particular country, the most immediate road thereto has a
good deal to be said in its favour, and that road would start From the
conditions in which the said country finds itself at the moment.
The present moment, the moment under consideration,
Capital is generally considered as perdurable, eternal and indestruct-
ible, This is probably an error. Gold coin in circulation wears down,
whence paper currency, to save attrition. Paper has to be renewed.
The expense is trifling but mathematically extant,
Jewels might seem to be property and not capital. They or precious
metal can be buried in cellars, Whence they work as a magnet.
Observe the magnetism of a man reputed to be wealthy. The force
of this rumour on those about him,
Observe the force of the wildest and mildest hopes of profit, and
consider the imponderabilia that enter into any consideration of
credit (‘the expectation that the other man will pay’).
A further point is that not only particular masses of credit may
rot, but that the credit of any economic system, qua system, may
rot.
Not only may a year’s crop fail, but the tree itself may.
There have been so-called systems based not on any sound thought
or equation but on nothing more than a temporary accident; as say
248

A BC OF ECONOMICS
the chance of swapping glass beads to the heathen, or the monopoly
of a trade route, or the willingness of Indians to swap forty square
miles of land for a rifle.
Some of these systems have lasted for at least three hundred years.
Nile tolls are at the beginning of history. Kublai understood paper
currency. The Mantuans in the quatrocento considered a cloth pool
on the lines of the Hoover government's buying of wheat. There is
probably no inventable scheme or measure that can't be upholstered
with historic background.
In 1933 Where are We?
For civilised countries the problem of production is solved. There are
doubtless particular products not producible in particular geographic
areas, and particular uncivilised areas where industrialisation, im-
proved methods of production would solve the local troubles, but for
the ‘great powers’ etc., the problem is not production.
2. The shortening of the working day (say to five or four hours)
would so aid the general distribution in all civilised countries that they
could carry on without other change for a considerable period.
3. But this would not in the long run permit them perpetually to
dodge the problem of a fair and/or adequate distribution of credit
slips. Called the problem of money or of the fiduciary system.
That is the main question and the overwhelming question of eco-
nomic science. It is, I should assert, open to permanent solution.
Scientific solution.
4, But a permanent and scientific solution of it would still leave us
with the necessity of practising the aut of economics; that is to say,
we should still have to exercise constant vigilance with the same
caginess that the peasant shows in selecting his next crop. There is no
way of dispensing with the perceptive faculties. Five year planners, ten
year planners, clever men, etc., will for ever have to guess and to
try to guess right re-what is to be produced and how much and
when,
Make fair the distribution of paper slips certifying work done, keep
the work distributed among a sufficient proportion of the people, and
you still must have constant caginess not to find yourself in October
with nothing but wheat, or nothing but aluminium frying pans.
And toward this end, there is probably no equation other than the
greatest watchfulness of the greatest number of the most competent.
One man asleep at a switch can very greatly discommode quite a
good railway.
In a world of Kreugers and Mellons you might say the switch-boards
are enveloped (on purpose) in darkness. What I am getting at is, that
with all the solvable problems solved, clear and in the open, there will
still be ‘opportunity’, there will still be need to use wits.
249

CIVILIZATION, MONEY AND HISTORY
Inflation (Science as possibly distinct from art in economics)
Inflation was said to be ‘understood’ in Germany after the war. There
are now almost universal cries for inflation (Germany, U.S.A., and
elsewhere),
‘There are very few demands for control of inflation.
Inflation is perhaps the ambiguous or camouflaging homonym for
a dozen or more manocuvres.
Dissociate what we can. For many people it means merely abandon-
ing the gold standard. Merely having certificates for something other
than precious metal,
‘The banks (the bogy men) inflate and deflate at will, or appear to.
We are told that the tariffs on money are too high, and the tellers
are answered that the bank rates on overnight money are almost mil.
So that is not the real crux. The banks possibly use their freedom to
inflate and deflate to their own disproportionate advantage.
TWO sorts of nations exist: those which control their fmances and those which ‘are
There are, I take it, intermediate degrees, nations that try more or
less to control part of their finances, or that exercise a semi-conscious
control over their finances, or have an unconscious influence on
them.
The American (U.S.) treasury was ‘freed’ about a century ago, It was
somewhat confused by the civil war, etc.
Once again we are not even concerned with How a people or nation
is to get control of its economics but with wHar it ought to do with
them if it did get control.
Another form of the question is; what price should it insist on get—
ting from the present controllers if it continues to tolerate their
control, i.e. what is the minimum (or maximum) of intelligence and
of intelligent measures it should demand of its ‘owners’ or financiers.
We have stated at least part of this in the formula.
ADEQUATE (and more or less just) distribution of credit slips
(certificates of work done, etc.).
I have put ‘apequate’ in capitals and ‘just’ in lower case because
that is the order of their importance.
There is a very great margin of error, a very great coefficient of
injustice possible in a quite workable and quite comfortable economic
system. The Miller of Dee and the rest of it, Once a human being is
comfortable, even tolerably comfortable, without actual suffering
and free, more or less, from 1MMEDIATE worry, he will not bother (to
an almost incredible degree he will refuse to bother) about economies.
But an inadequate distribution of credit slips will upset the whole
system, any system; it will heap up obstacles before anyone is aware,
it will heap them up all over the place and without ascribing responsi-
bility to anyone in particular, and without offering handy solutions.
250

ABC OF ECONOMICS
‘Adequate‘ with Queries about Solutions
The Mahometans ran on a share-out system.
I forget whether every fanatic got an equal share. It don’t much
matter, it was so long ago, but at any rate they had national dividends,
at least as long as they continued to conquest.
Tt is difficult to conceive national dividends in our day and in our
countries without a noisome increase in bureaucracy,
National dividends have worked in the past, Undoubtedly most
people would like to receive ten guineas a month in crisp bills from
the postman or other trusted minion of officialdom,
Tt sounds so easy, so casy that hardly anyone (including the author)
can believe it.
It Seems as if the recipients ought at least to go through the motions,
or to hold themselves ready to do something useful in return for the
bonanza, or at least to keep awake and make sure that something was
being done, that the greenbacks or Bradbury's or whatever, meant
and continued to mean something other than greenbacks.
Iseem to remember a time when Major Douglas wrote books without
mention of national dividends.
I am now making simply a catalogue or list of offered ‘solutions’.
Iam inclined to leave the national dividendists to show How they will
insure the perennial delivery of needed goods against distributed
greenbacks. I am not denying the possibility. 1 merely await fuller
enlightenment.
As nearly as I can recall Douglas's early expositions, he claimed that
in the present system a certain proportion of the credit-slips, or what
should be the quantity of same, were sucked up or absorbed or caused
to disappear.
1am purposely putting this the ‘other way on’ to see whether the
idea is sufficiently well constructed to stand being joggled about.
In the ‘present industrial system’, work is done, goods produced, and
the manufacturers, owners, traders, etc., demand from the public
more credit-slips than the work is worth, or at any rate more credit-
slips than the governments and banks will permit to be available
against that work.
And the effect is cumulative. There are constantly more goods and
constantly fewer and fewer valid certificates, which same leads to
constipation.
And again, if 1 remember rightly, Major Douglas explained how the
wangle was wangled. According to him, if I translate correctly, a
certain part of the credit-slips received by the entrepreneurs was wormed
down a sort of tube, i.e. instead of equalling the cost of the thing made
and given for it, it equalled that cost plus part of the machinery used
in producing the article (part of the plant),
And nothing was done against this amount of credit taken in from
251

CIVILIZATION, MONEY AND HISTORY
the public and hidden. It flowed continually down into the ground,
down into somebody's pocket.
Result-~-constantly more and more goods for sale~constantly fewer
certificates of work done,
So that to keep things even, one would have either to print more
slips, or to compute the cost in some other way, i.e. to distinguish
between real costs and costs according to the traditional book-keeping.
According to traditional book-keeping the Major's requirements
would have meant that impossible thing: sales under cost. But he
figured that they would not be less than the real cost, and that the
radox was all on paper.
All of which requires a bit of thinking.
Manifestly we have seen companies building new plants out of
‘profits’. Manifestly we have seen crises.
The foregoing is perhaps very confusing. [state in one place the maker
ought to get a certificate of work done, a fair certificate equivalent το
the work done.
Then I appear (to some readers) to say that he gets too much. When
I ought apparently to say that he gets too little.
There is no contradiction. He gets too much, or asks too much for
some of his product, and is unable to get anything for the rest.
Let us say he makes one million brooms that really cost him 3d.
each.
He asserts (in accordance to inherited beliefs of his accountants)
that they cost him Sd. and must be sold for 6d.
He sells 400,000 for 6d., has 600,000 left on his hands, and ultimately
goes bust, Despite the fact that five hundred or seven hundred thou-
sand people could use the brooms.
That is an ‘impossible case’, Or rather it is a crude statement, and
there are various intermediate conditions.
Say he drops his price to Id. and sells his six hundred thousand spare
brooms, and thereby ruins some other manufacturer, ete.
My imaginary example is merely to show that high price needn't
ensure perpetual success, and needn't be the best possible commerce.
The issue of credit (or money) must be just, i.e. neither too much
nor too little.
Against every hour’s work (human or kilowatt hour), an hour's
certificate. That can be the first step. That can be scientific, Ultimately
it must be scientific.
But it will not get you out of the necessity of using intelligence re-
what and how much you produce.
What? can be answered by ‘Everything useful or desirable’.
And the how much can be answered by ‘all that is wanted’ with
allowance over for accidents.
252

A B C OF ECONOMICS
That may sound very vague, but it is nevertheless reducible to
mathematical equations and can be scientifically treated.
The equations (algebraic equations) will not mean merely any old
quantity turned out haphazard.
Their answer will govern the length of the working day. By which
I still mean the number of hours’ work per day for which a man is
paid. Over and above which, he can paint pictures on his wall, stuff his
armchairs, breed fighting cocks, buy lottery tickets, or indulge in any
form of frugality or wastefulness that suits his temperament (so long
as he confines his action to his own property (vide definition in Part T).
So long as his action is confined to his own home and front yard.
Digression Perhaps Unnecessary
Personally I favour a home for each individual, in the sense that 1
think each individual should have a certain amount of cubic space
into which he or she can retire and be exempt from any outside
interference what so damn ever.
From that I should build individual rights, and as they move out
from that cubicle or inverted trapezoid they should be modified by
balancing and counterpoise of the same-sprung rights of others, up to
the rights of the state or the congeries,
Parallels political and economic.
Economics
There would seem to be the following kinds of error or crime in the
issuance of credit-slips against work.
1. The issuers may refuse to issue any slips, or adequate slips against
the work.
2. They may issue too many.
3. They may issue them in such a way that for products produced
and distributed in a complicated manner too much of the credit goes
to some, or some kind of the labour, and not enough to some other.
The terms ‘labour’, ‘work’, throughout this discussion apply to the
man with a shovel, the clerk, the transporter, the entrepreneur, etc.
Everyone who acts in the transposition of the article from mother
earth to the eater (eye of beholder, hand of user).
I know of no alphabetic or primer simplification of the questions of de-
and inflation. | mean nothing easier to comprehend than the history
of some particular instance, say the story of Van Buren versus Biddle in
the 1830's,
Atthe other end of the scale, Doughty's Arabia Deserta or Leo's history
of the eighth and ninth centuries can illumine the reader re-what
occurs when there is No production.
The point is that in any system, in any conceivable system, there
arise similar problems, whether under Soviet or Florentine Banker,
253

CIVILIZATION, MONEY AND HISTORY
The goods needed,
The transport,
The use or consumption. The necessity of motion, which means
both of goods and of the ‘carrier’,
Monetary carrier.
The clarity of mind that understands that one hundred gallons a
minute through an inch pipe at one speed can equal one hundred
gallons through a different pipe at another speed-the bigger the
slower, the faster the smaller, etc.
A small amount of ‘money’ changing hands rapidly will do the
work of a lot moving slowly, etc.
Asin mechanics some sizes of machine are found fit for some work,
etc., detailed applications without change of principle. Fruits of ex-
perience as to detail: ideas as to main causes.
This looks like a mare’s nest or like wilful confusion! What the
Major said fifteen years ago matters less than getting a valid and clear
statement.
The manufacturer is ‘paid’ in two ways under the present system,
He gets ‘money’ or ‘is owed’ money for what he sells, and he gets
ability to borrow from banks, i.e. his action and potentiality to produce
enable him to get credit as well as payments (cash and deferred) and
the banks get more credit than they give mi, i.e. he has to hand
part of it back to them, and for the part he hands back he gets no
direct credit, though he may get the ability to have more (on similar
terms).
Perhaps the only value of these statements is a test value. 1 mean that
Tam merely saying 5 and 2 make 7 in place of the other economists’
statements that 2 and 5 make 7, to see whether either they or their
readers understand their previous statements,
After all, this is a very rudimentary treatise.
By the time the banks have got more credit than they gave the
manufacturer, the potential consumer hasn’t enough credit to pur-
chase the needed goods, Where would he get it? The banks will al-
ways give him less than he has to give them, They are not there for
their health,
The book-keeping cost of the goods is the cost (real) of the goods
plus the cost of the money, or the rent of the money,
I take it that in the perfect economic state the cost of the money is
reduced almost to nothing, to something like the mere cost of postage,
and that this cost is borne by the state, i.e. distributed so as to be a
burden on no one in particular.
Once that end is attained, the general intelligence can apply itself
to the problem of what and how much to produce,
The state conceived as the public convenience. Money conceived as
a public convenience, Neither as private bonanza.
254

A BC OF ECONOMICS
Novelties
The possibility of novelties in economics is probably somewhat
exaggerated. Hume by 1750 is already talking of paper credit and cites
someone or other to the effect that the great amount of gold coin in
Athens seemed to be no use to the Athenians save in facilitating
arithmetic.
Twenty years ago we were asked to think that someone was
being a ‘modern’ with a large ‘M’ economist because he ‘left out
money’.
Some know and many fail to state or keep clearly in mind the need
of money, which is the need of a common denominator FOR THE SAKE
OF ACCOUNTING, so as not to send book-keepers crazy with columns of
ten horses, twelve cows, nine locomotives. Consider the chips in a
poker game, more convenient than to have each man betting his shirt,
watch and cuff-links.
A GRAVER FAILURE to dissociate: is in the nature of wealth, Crises in
the sheik and sheep trade seldom occur. I mean that the primitive
grazer counts his property in sheep and is not continually worried if
he cannot sell out his whole herd.
Half the modern trouble is the mania or hallucination or idée fixe of
MARKET and market value. The fundamental difference in wealth is
that of animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms.
All manufactured articles partake of the main property of the latter,
namely, they do not increase and multiply.
The shepherd's sheep multiply, the crops that are sown multiply,
and neither requires much work, 1 mean the shepherd sits around,
with a boy and a dog. The dangers from bears and wolves and other
incidents of primitive shepherd’s life have been diminished. In legend-
ary countries he may still do odd jobs of knitting.
The sheep supply clothing (Jefferson’s calculation was that one
sheep per person gave sufficient wool). The meat is disagreeable but
nutritive. There is no question of keeping theshepherd rutiy employed,
Crops demand work (too much) at special seasons.
But with a minimum of care crops and sheep multiply.
Your possessions and mine do not multiply. Your tables, pianos,
etc,, remain set as a mineral, but you can't get more by digging up the
floor of your cellar.
Hume already saw that ‘the increase and consumption (italics mine)
of all the commodities, which serve to the ornament and pleasure of
life, are advantages to society; because at the same time they multiply
those innocent gratifications to individuals, they are a kind of storehouse
(italics his) of labour ... which in the exigencies of the state, may be
turned to the public service’,
Hume might have served as a warning; for his ‘exigencies of state’
are mainly war, which fact ought to have made people think a bit
255

CIVILIZATION, MONEY AND HISTORY
more deeply. I suggest that it didn’t, for the simple reason that they
didn’t in the least understand his first proposition.
No book can do att a man’s thinking for him. The utility of any
statement is limited by the willingness of the receiver to think.
The practices of rent and interest arise out of the natural disposition
of grain and animals to multiply. The sense of right and justice which
has sustained the main practice of rent and interest through the ages,
despite countless instances of particular injustice in the application, is
inherent in the nature of animal and vegetable.
There is no need to postulate any greater perversion than natural
indolence, and that in itself is insufficient as postulate. There has
always been a supply of lackers, members of less civilised tribes, or
non-possidentes ready and glad to watch sheep for part of the wool.
The impulse of the French in our day to get work out of the Congo is
wholly traditional and ‘normal’.
As for selling children into servitude, ete., the whole problem is no
longer~but at many periods of history has been hardly more than-the
duration of mortmain, How long shall the dead hand rule, and to
what extent?
The two extremes: superstitious sacrosanctity of ‘property’ versus
Jefferson's ‘The earth belongs to the living’, which was part dogma,
and part observation of a fact so obvious that it took a man of genius to
perceive it.
It led Jefferson to the belief that no nation has the right to contract
debts not payable within the lifetime of the contractors, which he
interpreted to mean the lifetime of the majority of the contractors
who were of age at the date of contract. So that from a first estimate
of thirty-five years, he finally fixed on nineteen years as the limit of
validity of such debts.
By the light of his intelligence American economics improved from
the time of the revolution till the confusion of the U.S. eivil war.
No system of economics can be valid unless it take count of this
inherence in yegetable and animal nature (which inherence includes
or extends to overproduction).
aon ‘over-production’ usually means ‘more of a thing than
will sell’.
* After the last war Henry Ford as more than the ruins of Aigues Mortes
an experiment broke up a number of or Carcassonne.
armoured vessels. He made no money Yes, they occupy space. You don’t
profit, he μος back what it cost him, want 'em in Piccadilly Circus, I have
and he was left with a great number of also seen a sign translatable as:
engines, which, for all | know, he still ‘Mountain to let, capable of enalping
has. There is no reason to suppose 30,000 muttons.’ There ts still room to
that these engines do any harm, any breathe and walk about the face of the
planet.

A BC OF ECONOMICS
Dissociate Permanence from Permanence
Dissociate the perdurability of granite from the perdurability of grain
or of a species of animals. Some people seem to demand the same kind
of durability from a germinating organism as they do from the lump
of rock.
At the other end of the scale they say: A bank manager need know
nothing save the difference between a bill and a mortgage. Several
‘great financiers’ and prize-receiving ‘economists’ in our time fail to
make this distinction.
Economic habits arise from the nature of things (animal, mineral,
vegetable). Economic mess, evil theories are due to failure to keep the
different nature of different things clearly distinct in the mind.
The economic ‘revolution’ or an economic revolution occurred
when raw supply ceased to be limited to static mineral matter (plus
animal and vegetable increases).
The minute work began to be in great measure ‘raw supply’ the
need for a change in economic concepts arose.
The minute you have practically unlimited stores of work at your
disposal, (by the simple device of letting water run down hill through
a pipe onto a turbine, or any other device), you have got to begin to
readjust your mental derivatives.
Not only will sheep go on begetting each other, without much
attention from the shepherd, bur lights will shine, stoves give heat,
trains move, etc., while a couple of men watch a dynamo,
The cattle drover fed his family. The turbine can work for the
group. Even the idea of national dividends (which I dislike) seems less
goofy from this angle.
It is as idiotic to expect members of a civilized twentieth-century
community to go on working eight hours a day as it would be to
expect the shepherd to try to grow wool on his sheep by hand; the
farmer to blow with his own breath on each buried seed to warm it;
the poulterer to sit on his hens’ eggs.
People are so little used, or shall we say the readers of books and papers
are so little used to using their eyes, or so little travelled as never to
have seen simple phenomena,
Has the reader ever seen women at a well curb, or at a public spigot
or pump?
Kitchen plumbing, the spigot in the home, means half an hour's
idleness (or leisure) per day to every female member of the com-
munity. (Civilized community as compared with the savage and
with many very far from savage communities.)
Thisis not a theory of the leisure class. It is a fact of leisure humanity
(i.e. civilised human life).
257

CIVILIZATION, MONEY AND HISTORY
PART FIVE
Minor Addenda and Varia
I have never met a gambler with an ounce of intelligence, but the
prejudice against lotteries is in the category of superstitions, totem-
ism and taboo, Lotteries can harm only the imbeciles who buy tickets,
but these imbeciles appear to be wholly in their own right. As a means
of collecting money for state purposes no sound reason has ever been
adduced against this sane safety valve.
The instinct has been romanticised, doubtless in special cases it is
the only danger some men can incur and the only chance of adven-
ture they get. I doubt if it would greatly survive in a sane common-
wealth, but the world has not yet seen such a commonwealth. The
prejudice is part of the puritan imbecility, which is at root a disease,
begotten of the worst in nature.
‘There is, however, every reason why the imbecile pastime should be
isolated, i.e. confined in its effects to those who voluntarily gamble,
and that it should not be allowed to affect the price of foodstuffs and
necessities.
The whinings of a Whitney and the yowls of stock jobbers are no
better than any other form of gangster’s sobstuff.
‘The purpose of an act is one of its dimensions; is a component of its
specific gravity, and no one ever yet claimed to have sold short, or
rigged the stock market, save in the hope of picking other men’s
pockets.
There is nothing to be said against any gang of thieves playing poker
except that they are playing with other men’s money. When members
of a stock exchange play against each other without affecting the food
and welfare of members of the community who have no chance of
profiting by the play and in any case no voice in the laying of the bets,
the said brokers, etc., cannot make much showing as sportsmen.
They have had a fair amount of time to show what they have done
for their countries and so far haven't been able to dig up even a jour-
nalist liar to write them a tombstone, As a public utility they are not
a success,
It is perfectly easy to dissociate investment from speculation; it is
fairly easy to spin cobwebs over the borders of the dissociation. A stock
exchange confined to the buying and selling for real investors would
doubtless be very very dull, and many of the present practitioners and
scoundrels would take to golf and chicken-farming in preference to
such ovine tranquillity, but we are not out to guarantee the private
amusements of a few hundred or a few thousand barons.
It would be much better from the bono publico standpoint if they were
to kill themselves racing motor-boats, get their kicks playing the races,
258

A BC OF ECONOMICS
and leave the small fry to roulette and the lotteries. Economics, as
science, has no messianic call to alter the instincts.
Short of an absolute state ownership of all property there wi!
always be plenty of chance for men to ‘make fortunes’ with seriou
construction in industry. The fewer fake diamond mines, the mor
likely new inventions and amplifications will be to find support.
nore. The printing of fine books improved greatly after the lat
war. Because a great number of people had no confidence in the valu:
of money,
lam aware that I am here in a risky position, and that an attempt t
dogmatise might jeopard my credit, nevertheless I should hazard ;
guess that a definite good or gain occurred because of a definite state
of intelligence. The good occurred not because money was unstable,
which I don’t think anyone can regard as a desirable state of things,
but because these people were freed from the idée fixe of money as the
one and only fixed value.
I admit they were only half free and mostly bought de luxe editions
because they hoped to be able to sell them later at a profit, but at any
rate it was the ‘thin end of the wedge’; they had at least for ten minutes
got their eye on to something concrete. A few honest consumers and
a few of the better producers reaped a benefit,
Check Up
The remarks foregoing, even though they are in some cases my own,
have no claim to be novelties. Any man reading or re-reading a classic
will be affected by what he agrees with, but probably respect the ancient
author in proportion as he seems sound or as he seems to have ante-
dated modernity.
Thus in Hume, ‘Prices do not so much depend on the absolute
quantity of commodities and that of money which are in a nation, as
on that of the commodities which come or may come to market, and
that of the money which circulates’ (D, Hume, b. 1711, d. 1776. Essay on
Money).
The error of America in the 1830's was to bull the land market as if
unworked land far from railways could ‘yield’,
The analogy in the 1930’s is that the American fool has repeated
himself, putting ‘industry’ in the place of land, Le. stocks, shares in
industrial companies which either were not in shape to produce or
had no possible market anywhere within dreamable range of the
selling price of stocks in New York.
Hume's reasons for wanting what he calls a prosperous stage were
manifestly despicable, consisting mainly in the idea that if a state were
prosperous some disgusting louse like Louis XIV would be able to pay
the dregs of the population (his own or some one else’s) to go kill or
rob some one else. But that is no reason for not observing Hume’s
259

CIVILIZATION, MONEY AND HISTORY
intelligence. He already saw through money, saw through coined
money at that.
Some of his propositions are still valid, and possibly unsupercedable.
You will probably find nothing more valid inside its own scope than
the statement that prosperity depends not on the quantity of money in
a country but on its constantly increasing.
This was before the term inflation was in daily use.
pissociATE. Inflation, first used as a derogative term and now (1932)
advised as policy ‘all over the place’.
DISSOCIATE inflation from steady increase. The term inflation might
be limited to mean disproportionate and faked augmentation of the
amount of paper currency, an augmentation having no relation to
fact, or having a faked relation to fact.
INCREASE or Li 2 augmentation,
As certificate of an increasing productivity, increase of product,
increase of means of production there sHoutp be an increase in the
printed certificates of value (circulatable certificates).
But here again one must distinguish, and here in particular one can
learn from history and in particular the American history of the 1830's.
At that time there was a land boom, Fools bought land and boosted the
sale price regardless of the fact that the merchandise (land) wasn’t
producing, wasn’t being worked, couldn’t be worked at once or for a
considerable time, and there were crises and panics, etc.
‘Worthless’ land was just as worthless then as worthless machinery
and factories are now,
To need certificates of value the product (of land or of factory)
must be wanted by someone, and there must be means of getting it to
them.
There are four elements; and it is useless trying to function with
three:
1, The product.
2. The want.
3. The means of transport.
4. AND the certificates of value, preferably legal tender and ‘general’,
in the sense that they should be good for wheat, iron, lumber, dress
goods, or whatever the heart and stomach desire.
And (repeating an earlier proposition), everybody must be able
to get a certain number of these certificates on what might be
called decent conditions, ie. without torture and without excessive
worry.
Preferably on ‘fair-terms’, namely that the conditions for getting
them must not be violently different in the cases of A, B and C.
For the nth time, I repeat that the straightest road to such a desirable
condition is via the formula: a small amount of work for everyone,
with a certificate of work done as the consequence.
260

A B C OF ECONOMICS
The brains of the nation or group to be used in discerning wiat
work is most needful, what work is less necessary and what is desirable
even though not strictly necessary.
Such work should be paid. It would not fill up any man’s day,
The rest of his day he could employ in expressing his difference of
opinion with the majority, and in such ‘work’ or activity as he (as
distinct from the brains of the country officially organized) might
consider proper, necessary or desirable.
Ultimately your credit board or your bank scoundrels or whoever
is the financial and economic executive would have one main function
and would be judged intelligent or imbecile according as this was
performed with competence, They are there to determine, and so far
as possible to keep steady, the rate of increase in the printed certificates
of value.
And their motivation should be the homm publicur, the commonweal
and not the shifting and shaking the sieve for the benefit of a few
highly-placed crooks, scoundrels and exploiters,
The most opportune citation is from a Spaniard whose name is not,
in my source, printed, debating the new constitution, he observed
that where the financial influences had been too strong and uncon-
trolled, freedom had suffered.
‘THE BASES OF ECONOMICS are so simple as to render the subject almost
wholly uninteresting.
The complication of the subject is hardly a complication, it arises
A. from the extreme difficulty of foreseeing what will be wanted;
B. from the rascally nature of certain men, from selfishness of
exploiters and those in ‘favoured positions’ who fear to lose an
‘advantage’.
The best system of government, economically speaking, is that
which best balances the four clements listed above, be it republic,
monarchy, or soviet or dictatorship. In future it will probably be a
republic save in special cases, but republic or soviet, the government
which best manages this balance, which manages it with the least bunk
and blah and the greatest honesty, will and should probably prevail
‘as a system of government’,
Dictatorship as a Sign of Intelligence
Popular fancy and Ludwigian cheap-jackery show the dictator as man
of the hour, force of will, favoured of fortune.
The phase ‘intelligence’ is more interesting, Mussolini as intelligent
man is more interesting than Mussolini as the Big Stick. The Duce's
aphorisms and perceptions can be studied apart from his means of
getting them into action.
‘We are tired of a government in which there is no responsible per-
son having a hind name, a front name and an address,’
261

CIVILIZATION, MONEY AND HISTORY
‘Production is done by machines but consumption is still performed
by human beings.”
Also his Perception of the Dimension Quality
It is something, it was indeed a bright day when some ruler perceived
that there was a limit to the dimension quantity in the nation’s
productivity, | mean a limit to quantity of production that could be
advantageous either to a given nation or to the world, but that there
is no limit to the dimension quality. There have been attained maxima,
vide my criticism of art and letters for cited examples, but these attained
maxima are not ineluctable limits. Nothing forbids us to desire a better
art than that of the Quattrocento, We may be or may not be damned
unlikely to get it, but there is no harm in trying. At any rate, in the
dimension Quatity there is ample field for all human energy, no
one need feel cramped at having only four hours a day for paid
work.
After that, the problem of civilisation is pretty well outside the
domain of the economist, Neither the billionaire nor the whole howl-
ing populace can bribe, coax or bully the artist into surpassing his own
qualifications.
Five hundred people can get any kind of civilisation they like, up to
the capacity of their best inventor and maker. But all they can do for
him is to feed, clothe, and give him leisure and space to work in.
Finale
Within twenty-four hours of writing the above I find that R. H. C,
(in New English Weekly for 16 June 1932) has at last found an expression
simple enough to be understood by almost anyone, save possibly
Maynard Keynes or some paid mouthpiece of British Liberalism.
“Would you call it inflation to issue tickets for every seat in a hall,
despite the fact that the hall had never before been filled, or more
than a fourth of the seats sold, because of there not being enough
tickets available?
‘Inflation would consist in issuing more tickets than there are seats.”
That is the foundation stone of the New (Douglas) economics,
Keynes may have found it out by now; he was incapable of under-
standing it in 1920, and until he makes definite public acknowledg-
ment of the value of C. H. Douglas, I shall be compelled either to
regard him as a saphead or to believe that his writings arise from
motives lying deeper in the hinterland of his consciousness than
courtesy can permit me to penetrate.
262

A BC OF ECONOMICS
Conclusions : Or a Postscript in the Spring
‘... and they adopt a hundred contrivances, which serve no
purpose but to check industry, and to rob ourselves and our
neighbours of the common benefits of art and nature.’
DAVID HUME: The Balance of Trade.
An economic system in which it is more profitable to make guns to
blow men to pieces than to grow grain or make useful machinery, is
an outrage, and its supporters are enemies of the race.
2. The immediate problem is distribution.
3. National dividends are possible.
4. The moment you conceive money as certificate of work done,
taxes are an anomaly, for it would be perfectly simple to issue such
certificates of work done for the state, without wasting effort in re-
collecting certificates already in circulation,
This doesn’t mean that the state should buy just anything it fancies.
There would be a rush of ‘gold-diggers’ the moment such a concept
began to function, but there should also be an aroused sense of pro-
portion in values To the state.
There would be no miserliness in regard to sanitation, healthy
houses, medical and dental services, England now wastes three million
lives in peace time for every million lives spent in the war.
5. The popular instinct against taxation is sound. I repeat that
national dividends are possible, but I doubt their immediate necessity,
and in any case the first step toward them, whether you regard it
as proved right or as experiment, could (? should) be made by this
direct payment in newly conceived money for work publicly needed.
This might very possibly provide the just proportion of increase in
circulating medium needed to keep exchange healthy.
‘Prosperity comes of exchange’ (meaning exchange of different
goods, regardless of the steps, book-keeping, etc., which may inter-
vene).
6. A lot of rot is talked because of failure to dissociate different
meanings in the term ‘gold standard’,
Gold could serve as measure even with the new and newest fancy
brands of economics, so long as the issuance of money (needed for
exchange) isn’t ham-strung or exploited by people who happen to
have the gold at a given moment.
It is perfectly easy to increase the volume of money in circulation
without debasing its value.
7. Ifany of the author's opinions are wrong he will be only too glad
to change 'em on proof being adduced to their contraries, but he will
notalter them merely to please gunmakers' touts or subsidised econo-
mists who for twenty or more years have done nothing save their
utmost to wrap up the subject in tissue paper, and to involve it in
263

CIVILIZATION, MONEY AND HISTORY
mystery. Their opinions are suspect because of probable motives, and
they never meet open statement by open statement but solely by
avoidance or by running off at a bias.
I personally heard one of the chief and most despicable fakers
describe himself as an ‘orthodox economist’. ‘Orthodox’ and subsi-
dised physicists condemned Galileo.
Political bearing
Both in England and in America the new party should be a MATERIAL
PARTY with three parts to its platform:
1, When enough exists, means should be found to distribute it to the
people who need it.
2. Itis the business of the nation to see that its own citizens get their
share, before worrying about the rest of the world.
(If not, what is the sense of being ‘united’ or organised as a state?
What is the meaning of ‘citizen’?)
3. When the potential production (the possible production) of
inything is sufficient to meet everyone's needs, it is the business of the
government to see that both production and distribution are achieved.

John Buchan’s ‘Cromwell’
A NOTE
y great wisdom sodomy and usury were seen coupled together.
If there comes ever a rebirth or resurrection of Christian
Church, one and Catholic, a recognition of divinity as
La somma sapienza e il primo amore
it will come with a recognition and an abjuration of the great sin
contra naturam, of the prime sin against natural abundance.
Art registers the state of man’s soul (or whatever you want to call
the compendium of his faculties). The silly prejudice against Leo
Frobenius should fall before his indubitably great contemporary ser-
vice to enlightenment in hammering on this fandamental.
The non-theological can take it as ‘the swift perception of relations’,
and leave out supernatural connotations. The manifest are from light
to black festering darkness can be measured in the material facts:
I. The church of St, Hilaire in Poitiers.
Il, The bomb-proof, gas-proof cellar beneath the Rothschild private
palace in Paris, whereto the works of art (as having commercial vaLuE,
monetary worth) are transported when the great chief usurer leaves
that fatal and mentally foetid city.
The latter is the objective and material register of progressive
human degradation, as result of moral obtuseness.
Dr, Hackett found two kinds of mosquito. No difference under the
strongest microscope; but they lay different kinds of eggs, one virulent
with malaria, the other innocuous, Usury and the increment of association
under unobservant eye were confused one with the other, The brutal
and savage mythology of the Hebrews was revived with the fall of
mediaeval iviiaaion and the festering mind of Calvin, haeresiarchus,
perditissimus, distilled a moral syphilis throughout the whole body of
society. The grossening and fattening of European architecture was
the contemporary imprint of his diseased condition.
John Buchan, although professing no very clear economic ideas, has
been fairly clear on pages 8-9 of his ‘Cromwell’? as to the decline of
English mentality, from Bucer and Latimer toward the decadence.
It shows in England's versification. These things move parallel.
Spectamur agendo, From all the beauty that was full of light, from all
the mediaeval respect for intelligence, the sanity that could sce the
1 The New English Weekly, 6 June 1935; 2 Oliver Cromwell, by J. Buchan,
Impact (Regnery, 1960), Houghton Mifflin.
265

CIVILIZATION, MONEY AND HISTORY
heologian as athlete of the spirit, this curve descends in ratio with the
ise of old-testament-olatry, with the commodity theory of money,
ind the elevation of usury to pre-eminence, with the cant about
varity, the kow-tow to sterility.
Given the degree of economic sensibility in the more lively con-
emporary historians, one is impatient of a good deal of Buchan’s
letail. We can, however, isolate the facts that fall inside our field of
nterest. Thomas Cromwell, born about 1485, travelled and learnt
nternational banking, settled in London as merchant and money-
ender, Zealous for publication of Bible in England, ‘cared nothing for
eligion’. Page 56, ‘the difficulty was money’; 444 pages, not a history
or social creditors, a history for arm-chair retrospectors with a hobby.
wonder if this is too severe a judgment on a book that must have cost
. good deal of labour to its compiler?
I wonder whether we can’t get to the root by saying that Governor-
seneral Buchan has a little mislaid the real reason for writing and
eading history, namely that the past should be a light for the future.
That the purpose of history is instruction, that is to make people think
ind to guide their thought toward what will elucidate today and
omorrow.
In any case a certain tedium is bound to inhere, increasingly, in all
histories that do not aim chiefly to focus their knowledge upon the
most vital issues of today (or, conjecturally, of tomorrow).
The human interest in Cromwell is of secondary order. The seven-
eenth century is not, relatively, a very interesting epoch—by compari-
on, that is, with periods in which there was more crucial struggle over
ssues more intimately bound up with our own.
This mustn’t be taken extremely. But we should distinguish between
historic study having purposeful focus on life as we know it, and a sort
of extension of books of reference, ‘mines’ as they are called, for those
who want to collect matter which can be so focused.
‘Purposeful focus’ does not mean distortion. An air of impartiality
may give grace to narrative, but it may also cause history to fall short
of greatness. John Buchan’s historic curiosity is not of the most biting
kind, it is not an insatiable curiosity determined to understand all the
facts of Cromwell's career. A man could conceivably write with this
high burning curiosity and keep it directed strictly on to the rast, thus
making it serve, even more effectively, as an escape mechanism. Even
that would have produced a livelier book than the present, a book no
more purposeful than Ludwig’s popular cheap-jackery.
Over and above these exercises, whether commercial speculation,
juggling for notoriety, or in Buchan’s case the gentlemanly exercise
of wide leisure, there could be a more eminent kind of history, that
which would do its utmost to use past ascertainable fact as enlighten-
ment to present, all too oppressive, problems.
266

History and Ignorance’
istory that omits economics will not eternally be accepted as
anything but a farce or a fake, The re cloacal ignorance of
professors, of reporters who offer chronicles with no econo-
mic analysis, can not forever pass as enlightenment,
It, as a matter of fact, has not always passed as enlightenment. The
real foci of power have never swallowed this sort of tosh. Vide, let us
say, the Venetian ambassador, Barton Morosini’s report on John Law,
to the Venetian Senate 28 January 1723.
Somewhere or other, perhaps in Barney Baruch’s private files, there
is or has been some history. Zaharoff once knew some history.
An intelligentsia that accepts anything less is merely an ignorantsia
with an Ersatz lion’s skin draped over its ass ears.
‘Because no one
can sell the moon
to the moon.’
The Manchester Guardian howl that poetry should be a lavender
sachet bag, and omit all the major content of the Divina Commedia
comes well from fake pacifist quarters.
Pacifists who refuse to investigate the economic causes of war make
common cause with the gun sellers.
I sincerely hope Congressman Tinkham will keep on with his
agitation for the investigation of endowments, in particular re the use
of funds by the Carnegie Endowment for Peace.
As an historian I have a legitimate curiosity as to why so little atten-
tion has been given to economics as a factor in incitement to war
(direct or indirect) or why so little curiosity has been shown as to
economic determinism as a factor in cause of hostilities; or why
American education so tamely accepts titular heads whose cause of
being is wrapped in so many veils.
Should a National Academy have or not have intellectual curiosity,
should it stimulate inquisitive minds? Should the education of the
élite be focussed solely or predominantly on the manufacture of
robots and tame rabbits?
Should a national academy Desine a correlation of active knowledge?
Should it take any ACTION to promote it? Has the American Academy
ever shown the faintest interest in living thought? And if so who hides
the documents that would prove it?
1 The New English Weekly, 25 July 1935; Impact (Regnery, 1960).
267

CIVILIZATION, MONEY AND HISTORY
What percentage of American college presidents owe their advance-
nent to complacency? Is the Harding-Hoover era the ideal summit of
\merican intellection? Are the left overs of this era the ideal guides
or the next generation?
Harvard, | hear, is still afflicted with Sprague. I was deceived by a
atalogue of one section of their beanery, whereas Sprague has been
yut back of the smoke screen in another. This kind of professor trained
ur solons. In the stratosphere on a pink cloud we observe the era
vhen someone will look into American education and find it vapid;
nto American ‘Foundations’ and find them putrid.
Are men who were perfectly adjusted to this era, who ‘rose to
srominence’ during those murky days, the best eyes for the people?
And so forth.... The best of us can not avoid contagion. Major
Douglas himself, can resist strictly economic lies, but somewhere
comes the moment of fatigue or inattention. I have known it and I
cnow no man who has not. By sheer dint of repetition we have all
f us imbibed, absorbed prejudice, if not about the matters we were
pecifically intent on, certainly on periphery matter: e.g., even I was
nisled re Italian censorship simply by foreign lies,
I have already cited both Tour du Pin and Marx as IGNORING money,
s being unconscious of the problem In Money. It is less the matters we
think about, than the things ‘we never think or’ that lead us into
rror.
The teaching of literature was so inefficient in my young days (and
probably still is), that I have had to find out at 49 what I might per-
ectly well have been told at 17, Dr. Rouse's correspondence during
the past months, shows that he has not escaped similar experience.
Jefferson, forgotten, Van Buren simply kept under cover, the sim-
lest possible equations, such as those recently cited by Congressman
Soldsborough, are kerr our of the mind not only of the man in the
treet, but of the men who should specifically be not only vaguely
wware of them, but specifically and acutely ALERT to them.
Omissions such as those Reckitt found in Somervell, should and
probably will be found comic in some decently informed future era,
The intelligentsia do not get ideas, they merely get the spare parts of
ideas, Put it another way; cranks and doctrinaires try to propagate
specific details of a system often without understanding the system to
~— these details belong, let alone the relation of that system to any
other.
A work of art, any serious work vivifies a man's total perception of relations,
It makes no difference whether the work is a Bach fugue or a draw-
ing by Durer or the movement of words in the Odyssey.
Les arts decoratifs, are mere relaxation, slumber stuff, escape mechan-
isms,
The hat trick is possible because this escape does in a way resemble
268

HISTORY AND IGNORANCE
the great breath, the refreshment and reinvigoration that comes with
emergence from immediate fuss over some personal impasse. This is
found in great art wHeN the beholder isn’t too dulled or fatigued to
deal with the great or real art at all.
Naturally the bastards who do not want truth, who do not want a
democratization of the perception of relations, howl and weep when-
ever poetry emerges from the lavender sachet and bric-a-brac cate-
ory.
- There are even in England, and they have to my disgust penetrated
even to the purlews of Chancery Lane, mangy mice so low that they
want to eliminate the whole major domain of writing-let us say, the
major domain of the Divina Commedia-from the scope of the poets,
This is in part due to stinking snobism, part to craven and bootlick-
ing cowardice, and part to sheer gross and utter ignorance of the
tradition of writing, and of the great works of literature.
The maintainers of mass murder and mass malnutrition have in
these people very useful, if unconscious, allies.

Banks’
it wo kinds of banks have existed: The MONTE DEL FASCHI and the
devils.
Banks built for beneficence, for reconstruction; and banks
reated to prey on the people.
Three centuries of Medici wisdom went into the Monte dei Paschi,
1e only bank that has stood from 1600 till our time.
Siena was flat on her back, without money after the Florentine
onquest.
Cosimo, first duke of Tuscany, had all the Medici banking experi-
nce behind him. He guaranteed the capital of the Monte, taking as
curity the one living property of Siena, and a certain amount of
»mewhat unhandy collateral.
That is to say, Siena had grazing lands down toward Grosseto, and
he grazing rights worth 10,000 ducats a year. On this basis taking it
or his main security, Cosimo underwrote a capital of 200,000 ducats,
> pay 5 per cent to the sharcholders, and to be lent at 54 per cent;
verhead kept down to a minimum; salaries at the minimum and all
xcess of profit over that to go to hospitals and works for the benefit
f the people of Siena. That was in the first years of the seventeenth
entury, and that bank is open today. It outlasted Napoleon, You can
pen an account there tomorrow.
And the lesson is the yery basis of solid banking. The cxepir rests
1 ultimate on the ABUNDANCE OF NATURE, On the growing grass that can
ourish the living sheep.
And the moral is in the inreNtIon. It was not for the conquerors
mmediate short-sighted profit, but to restart the life and productivity
f Siena, that this bank was contrived.
The hell banks have, from as far as the record takes us, started as
angs of creditors, associated to strangle the last ounce of profit out
f their debtors. This they have done with splendour, boasts and
arade, They have stood for exactitude in accounting. Once the dice
ave been loaded, they have counted up every point, every decimal.
chief and most glorified was the Banca S. Giorgio, the pitiless com-
any of Genoese creditors, the model bank among bankers, against
vhich I am, for all I know, the first to utter detraction.
‘About the year 1200 there existed in Genoa, divers societies …
1 From Social Credit: Am Impact (1935). See Cantos XLIU-LI, Ed,
270

BANKS
‘In 1232 they united... .
‘In 1451, 9th April. The commune of Genoa vested in perpetuity
its dogana (that is the collection of all import tax), in the Banca
S. Giorgio.”
That means the bank got all the proceeds.
‘1539. The Doge, governors and procurators confirmed and anew
conceded and assigned to the protectors of S. Giorgio all the pro-
ceeds of the salt tax ... approving the addition of the taxes on oil
and grain, meat, wine, etc. … with the right to sell the same if they
chose.
‘1749 the bank got the right to tax church property also, but at a
fourth less than secular.
‘The revolution of 1797 disorganised its collection of taxes, the
provisional government leaving the bank of (S. Giorgio) provision-
ally its internal administration and the collection of customs, took
from its directors their absolute civil and criminal jurisdiction as incompat-
ible with unity of the republic, and the sovereignty of the people.”
Memorie sulla hanca di S. Giorgio, Genoa, 1832. Compiled by their keeper
of archives, Antonio Lobero.
Lobero seems rather indignant at this infringement of bankers’
omnipotence, his spirit appears reincarnate in our day in Paul Einzig.
This shows what bankers will placidly do if you let ‘em, The great
company of St. George could be both plaintiff and judge in a civil or
criminal suit against its interests.
The arts did not flourish in Genoa, she took almost no part in the
intellectual activity of the renaissance. Cities a tenth her size have left
more durable treasure,
271

The Individual in his Milieu’
A STUDY OF RELATIONS AND GESELL*
! \ wenty years ago little magazines served to break a monopoly,
to release communication, mainly about letters, from an
oppressive control, and they now wither on the stalk because
they refuse to go on from where the late Henry James was interrupted,
H. J. perceived the Anagke of the modern world to be money; he
thought he ought to ‘go down town’, and found that he couldn't.
He lett, for posthumous publication, an unfinished meditation on the
money-acquiring faculty. Proust was, by comparison, an insignificant
snob, with no deep curiosity as to the working of modern society, apart
from his own career in it (a boot-licking sycophantic crawl] in wake of a
few contemptible remnants),
The diseased periphery of letters is now howling that literature and
poetry in especial, should keep within bounds. I find this limitation
entitled ‘respect itself’, which phrase is perverted to mean that litera-
ture should eschew the major field by omitting and leaving untackled
a great deal of the subject matter that interested such diverse writers as
Propertius, Dante and Lope de Vega.
The Anagke of our time is money. Cf. Colombus' rhapsody in Lope
de Vega’s Nuevo Mando. Curiosity sank very low during the nineteenth
century. Marx and La Tour du Pin were equally deaf, dumb and blind
to money, La Tour du Pin managed to write a whole chapter in denun-
ciation of usury without looking into its substance.
Economics in our time is where medicine was when professors
studied the subject in Aristotle and refused to look at dissecting tables.
The history of money is yet to be written. Even the scattered fragments
are comprehensible only to men who start clean, that is with observa-
tion of present day facts, and refuse to lie down until they have studied
the relations and causes of actual present phenomena.
Literature that tries to avoid the consideration of causes remains
silly bric-a-brac.
The archaeologist and serendipidist can wander back through
Claudius Salmasius and find the known beginnings of usury entangled
with those of marine insurance, sea lawyers, the law of Rhodes, the
disputed text of Antoninus Pius on the limits of his jurisdiction. Even
* The Criterion, October 1935; Impact
(Regnery, 1960).
* Silvio Gesell: The Notural Economic 272
Order, Published by Hugo Fack, 309
Madison Street, San Antonio, Texas.

THE INDIVIDUAL IN HIS MILIEU
then the dealers in metal appeared to be privileged over other mer-
chants, and the insurance risk mainly paid by the takers of greater
risk. Vast mines of anecdote lie still unexploited,
Apart from the eminent Claudius Salmasius; we offer the retro-
spector and serendipidist, the labours by and of Gabriele Biel, doctis-
simo viro or vir doctissimus, Francisco Curtio, Albert Bruni,
Antonii Solae, if not as enlightenments at least to show that human
curiosity does not set sail for the first time into these regions.
The revivers of Hebrew mythology lose interest when they come to
Leviticus. The Roman Empire may have risen via the substitution of
land usury for sea usury. The ‘Church’ declined and fell on this issue.
Historians have left the politics of Luther and of Calvin in the blurr of
great ignorance.
Gesell was right in thanking his destiny that he had begun his study
of money unclogged by university training. But as focus in 1935?
What other possible subject could bring together the Pope of Rome,
a Scotch engineer in the orient, the English Church Assembly, a
German business man in the Argentine, a physicist, a biologist, a
medical journalist, an orthologist and historian of philosophy, and the
present practitioner of versification?
Voila l'estat divers d’entre eulx!
The only class excluded being blind journalists, second-rate writers,
literary hangers-on and their ambience.
The little magazine rose with the need for cleansing our language,
in the domain of logic and philosophy, this meant the elimination of
false dilemmas and indefinite middles, in the domain of morals it was
basic and essential, Until a man can speak of one thing or one category
of actions as distinct from another it is useless for him to try to define
right and wrong.
The Church slumped into a toleration of usury. Protestantism as
factive and organised, may have sprung from nothing but pro-usury
politics. And the amazing history of the nineteenth century is sum-
med up in: ‘Marx found nothing to criticise in money.’ That phrase
applied to all the latter half of one nineteenth century. Itapplied down
to 1915 when Gesell opened fire.
We have yet to improve on Gesell’s criteria:
‘He would judge money not by its chemical analysis, but by the
number of unemployed and by the unsold inventories. These he
regarded as the real tests of monetary efficiency. With regard to the
compilation of an index number, he would have the relative impor-
tance of each commodity determined according to the number of
men employed in its production.”
4 (Stabilised Money. 1. Fisher, assisted by H.R. L, Cohrssen, Allen and Unwin, 1935.)
273

CIVILIZATION, MONEY AND HISTORY
Iattempted in my ABC to proceed in more or less Euclidean fashion
to list the essential elements of the whole problem, i.c., those few
elements without which no economic system can be.
‘The question for our time is: ‘What is money?’ After reading and
writing and before arithmetic, or even before reading and writing the
first human instruction, in our time, should lie in this query, We have
seen an American administration tricked because it did not observe a
transition (videlicet hat trick) from pure mathematics, the pure
science of arithmetic (numbers) to numeration in terms of money
(i.e., to the numeration of something unstable).
Gesell entered history with this question, and with the perception of
nineteenth-century blindness (specifically Marx's).
He entered the ranks of great men by a detection of injustice coupled
with a passion for justice. The merchants of money, the makers and
dealers in money had privilege above all other citizens. This privilege
was enormous, secret, unacknowledged,
On his passion a sect arose, and demonstrated his justice. And on this
sole base he stands established in contemporary thought, wherever
that thought is deep and alive.
No one man corrals all thought, and no one man ends all invention.
No man carries on the world’s thought without concurrent think-
ing by others.
Gesell invented counter-usury. He did this straight off his own bat.
He had, almost certainly never heard of ecclesiastical bracteates. Even
the obscure chapter of history wherein they are recorded can hardly
dim his claim to invention,
I doubt if anyone will make a satisfactory summary of The Natural
Economic Order, and I doubt if the printing costs would be as wisely spent
on such summary as on an attempt to show the relation of that book
to its decade and to the few years therafter. The appalling and nauseous
decadence of architecture, stone cutting, art forms after 1500 etc., the
loss of moral and terminological clarity, the reduction of philosophy
to mere lackeyship toward material sciences all of them run contem-
porary with each other, and in that barocco was lost the distinction
between usury and partaggio.!
Whatever Gesell saw, he did not make clear or emphasise Marx's
failure to focus the source of value and he, Gesell, did not proclaim the
distinction between usury and the increment of association.
No economic system can neglect these fundamental dissociations,
and no monetary system can rise above the status of gadget if it be not
in concord with some order of thought, with some system of moral criteria.
Mildness may lead a man to very clear perception, and the phrase
‘burning for justice’ may lie outside the scope of present discussion,
1 Cf, Canto XLVI. Ed.
274

THE INDIVIDUAL IN HIS MILIEU
There will be, ad infinitum, a series of professors who have lecture
hours to fill and who can go into Gesell retrospectively. My problem
is the utility and vitality of Gesell in the year 1935 and in the months
there immediate following.
Gesell questioned the privilege of money over and above all other
products of human ingenuity, and he declared against its being the
sole fabrication free of tax in a world wherein the good life was being,
with increasing acrimony, taxed and stifled out of existence. He, there-
upon, devised a tax on money, which requires no bureaucracy to levy
it, and which falls with utter impartial justice on every hoarder or
delayer of money.
That there should remain any single free trader, any inheritor of
that imperfect sect, too dull to glorify Gesell is almost beyond the
bounds of imagination, and can be set down only to crass and very
black ignorance.
The present state of economic sectarian fugg could be paralleled only
by an ignorance which refused to believe in a Westinghouse brake,
because it had just heard of a turbine.
Gesell was so right that ignorant men, and/or men ignorant of his
writing, are now (after 20 years’ interval) moving toward him without
knowing it.
But lying outside its scope and apart from Gesell’s love of freedom,
and his concept of Freiwirtschaft, yet serving to establish its locus,
stands the declaration: value in our time arises mainly from the
cultural heritage.
Economically speaking that heritage is the whole aggregate of
human inventions, ameliorations of seed, of agricultural and mechani-
cal process belonging to no one man, and to no group, escaping the
possibilities of any definition of patents under any possible system of
patent rights, and all this was forerun and fore-paralleled by ancient
moderations, by ancient justices in regard to the increment of associa-
tion, and in the establishment of common land, held simultaneous
with fief and with freehold.
The overplus of what a group of men can do acting together, over
and above the sum of what they can do each acting alone, is a reality,
and no system either of thought or action can be perfect or even
reasonably just or complete if it refuse to take count of this reality,
Between Douglas and Gesell there is a contest of justice with justice,
neither, of a right, excluding the other's justice.
Take it at the surface and wrangle over detail and you will get
nowhere, or merely into a tangle, Carry it down to its root in justice
and you find no needful contradiction.
There is no more reason for refusing either justice than for refusing
to drink because you have eaten,
So long as Douglasites refuse to consider (if they any of them really
275

CIVILIZATION, MONEY AND HISTORY
do so refuse) the unjust privileges of money above any other product,
so long as Gesellites refuse to consider the cultural heritage (the in-
crement of association, and the possibilities inherent in a right propor-
tion in the issue of fixed money and Schwundgeld, monnaie fondante,
stamp scrip) for just so long will both groups sabotage each other and
delay economic light.
A membership ticket in neither party exempts its holder from the
natural human frailty of being bored at the thought of changing a
painfully acquired set of ideas.
No Douglasite can improve on Gesell’s criteria for money.
No Gesellite will get deeper than Douglas’s fountain of values.
The peripheries of both sects are adumbrated by superstition, the
Gescllites haven’t (at date of writing 1935) got rid of the work complex
(clarified months ago by the Church of England Assembly).
Neither side shows adequate readiness to define their lines of agree-
ment with the other.
As there may be, even at this late date, occasional readers who have
no very clear idea of Gesell’s chief monetary invention it might be
well to describe it, at the same time stating one’s system for assessing it
in relation to the only other two systems of our time worth serious
attention.
Philosophically one will estimate these systems on a basis of justice,
Gesell protested against the unjust privileges of money over all other
human products and inventions. He invented (roughly speaking)
counter-usury. And his mechanism is comprehensible to the simplest.
He proposed and his disciples have issued paper money which requires
(in its best mode) the affixation of a monthly stamp to maintain its par
value. This stamp in Woérgl was for 1 per cent of face value of the
notes. Thus taxation was fixed on the money itself, and accelerated
the circulation of this money, whereas all other forms of taxation
weigh on, cramp, sabotage exchange.
It must, however, be confessed that stamp scrip has never yet func-
tioned in an hermetically sealed area. It has functioned in concurrence
with and been measurable by, a fixed or old-fashioned money.
If the present writer has been of any use, it may be found (bar com-
petitors unknown to him) that he at least tried to summarise, lay out
the essential elements in any economic system, as you would find the
elements and primary machines in the opening chapters of a text book
on physics, and that the great mass of economic literature is either
special pleading, special description beginning haphazard, talking of a
state of things, or moving in vaguely chronological order.
Ina more or less Euclidean treatment or frame-work we find goods
276

THE INDIVIDUAL IN HIS MILIEU
of different durabilities~from quickly perishable fruit and vegetables
to the art works of Chaldae.
Gesell, as merchant and agricultural thinker, was oppressed by the
hideously unjust privilege of durable money over and above farm
produce and merchandise.
He did not greatly consider works of art, though he was acquainted
with hoardable goods.
He did, with absolute and incontrovertible justice, consider the evils
of usury, the injustice of supposing that money ‘grows’ (vide Shylock,
etc.), while goods perish. I won't say that the ‘rise in value’ of rarities
concerned him sufficiently. But at any rate | offer the proposition that
with a just proportim between Schwundgeld, res moneta, monnaie
fondante, stamp scrip and a fixed money not needing a monthly stamp,
you would have the simplest possible system for maintaining a mone-
tary representation of extant goods, i.e., A ‘money picture’ of extant
goods.
The various degrees of durability, fruit, grain, clothing, houses,
wood, stone and machinery, art works, could conceivably (but very
cumbrously) be each represented by moncy that should melt at parallel
rate. No man in his senses would propose such a system for practical
use, But a just proportion between a fixed and a diminishing money
would equate the value of all goods to the value of available money.
For what it may be worth my ABC, written in ignorance of Gesell,
left a place for Schwundgeld. This ought to have a confirmative value,
just as a table of known chemical elements, with certain lacunae,
serves to validate the existence, or be ready to welcome a newly
discovered chemical clement.
Once discovered I don’t see how Gesell’s idea can disappear. It will
not crawl back again into its box. We find honest economists sporadi-
cally coming on it independently as soon as they begin to think of
modern conditions.
Gesell’s limitation in regard to the corporate state, lay perhaps only
in space, time and energy. He was born long before Mussolini, he had
not the Duce’s organising capacity or his knowledge of men.
In respect to C. H. Douglas, Gesell as business man, having discovered
a most marvellous mechanism for unshackling commerce, for
liberating all trade and consumption from the manacles of the money
monopoly, having invented an unhoardable money, a money that
cries to be spent within a given period of time, went on only toward
consideration of land,
A concrete mind. The solidity of his good sense indisputably demon-
strated at Woérgl and Lilienthal, where the continuity of his mechan-
ism in practice, a working (therefore workable) system was only
interrupted by brute force, the Austrian government playing catspaw
to the international thieves’ and murderers’ association, by no right,
27

CIVILIZATION, MONEY AND HISTORY
by no justice, by brute stupidity and malevolence, with force on the
spot and the power of preventing very wide publicity of their infamy
from spreading outside their own tyrannised borders.
Germany under the heel of Dr. Schacht (no better than William or
Von Papen) has suppressed all her Freiwirtschaft organisations and
deserves whatever she gets. This is her own crime against herself and
goes to augment the long list of high commercial treasons committed
by Germans since 1919 against their own fatherland.
No country can suppress truth and live well. No people that per-
mits the suppression of science either deserves to or can maintain its
internal freedom. Germany is less the waiting brigand than the be-
trayer of herself from within. This self-betrayal she has committed by
vending inventions to enemies, by keeping her people in ignorance of
their potential deliverers. Nevertheless, faced with Douglas, Gesell
neither saw nor demanded to know more about the generation of
value.
He saw (to his eternal glory) that Marx did not question money,
Douglas saw the limitation of Marx’s value theory. He saw that if
value arises from work, a vast deal of that work has already been done
by men who can no longer eat its fruit, namely by the dead, by Edison,
Carleton, and ten thousand others, who have rendered it needless to
get up water from wells with buckets, to put oil into individual lamps,
to dig and burn coal in order to cook and run railway trains, etc.,
ete., etc., ad infinitum,
When Dr. Fack and the noble Gesellites consider this perfectly
justifiable extension of justice which in no way invalidates Silvio
Gesell, they will be ready for a scientific economy, as distinct from a
sectarian.
Gesell, fighting usury, did not specifically confuse it with the incre-
ment of association,
But if he consciously noted their difference, he failed to spend any
great verbal energy in sorting out one from the other.
If we are to regard economics as part of a gentleman’s education,
we must distinguish between workable a-moral mechanisms, and ‘la
più alta giustizia sociale’, We must even distinguish, at least in our
studies and drawing rooms, between a partially just and workable
system, and further developments of justice which are equally subject
to ‘natural dimostramento’, to sanction by praxis (alias their being
able to deliver the goods).
Rabid doctrinaires, the extremely non-perceptive red left, attack
Douglas because he leaves a bit of our civilisation standing. Why
philosophic communists haven't flocked to Douglas, and why all the
slabsided canting levellers haven't locked to Gesell is a mystery or
would be if one failed to allow for the non-existence of philosophic
communists, or for the lack of any real reasoning or intelligence
278

THE INDIVIDUAL IN HIS MILIEU
among levellers (dominated by hate and envy and deficient in the
greater part of the sensitive and perceptive gamut).
The Corporate State existing in space and time, has employed itself
settling and building a mechanism for fair trading with foreign coun-
tries.
This lies largely outside the domains of both Gesell and Douglas,
but in no way obstructs them, or could by them be obstructed. You
promote the peace of the world by the good internal government of
your country.
Douglas and Gesell both aim at enabling the whole people in any one
country, to use their own product, and both release the entire people
from dependence on export. Thatis to say make it possible for them to
buy what they have, instead of placing them under the murderous
necessity of throwing it overboard at the command of ghouls and
tyrants in order to get purchasing power to buy steadily decreasing
amounts of steadily worsening food, cloths, etc.
This possibility to eat, sleep and keep warm at home without invad-
ing foreign markets, conduces to that sanity which Mussolini has
obtained largely by force of character, aided by control of his banking
system, the checking of foreign devils who wanted to sink the value of
the lira, etc.
Many of his measures would be considered emergency measures by
either Douglas or Gesell. They are none the less valid.
All the candied fruit companies save two have gone bankrupt and so
forth. (23 April 1935.) Yet it is possible that by the time this essay
reaches the printing room the Italian people will be able to buy a
higher percentage of their Home produce than at present.
At the date of revising this article, 3 June 1935, the official Italian
publications contain more honesty and intelligence than all the other
government publications in Europe and America put together. A will
toward truth, toward the good of the people, must, if enlightened,
take count of possibility in space and time, that is in a particular time
and in a particular area, amid given material circumstance. At the
present moment no other major government has any such will
whatsoever,
Germany is most enslaved, France most befuddled, and neither
England or America inspire a hog's worth of respect outside their own
publics hypnotised by news control and perverted publicity, (23 April
1935, anno XIII, tredici.)
It is impossible in our time to discuss economic thought save with
regard to time and orthology. The ‘place’ of =. man in the history
of economics, the vitality of any idea is measurable by its consequence,
I mean its consequence in ideas, not only in reference to ideas emerging
specifically from it, as fruit and flower, but in ideas and dissociations of
ideas caused in the attempt to combat or to rectify it,
279

CIVILIZATION, MONEY AND HISTORY
Thus you can measure both Douglas and Gesell by events, as for
example by the English Church Assembly's dissociation of work from
employment, which latter is the Sale of work usually under economic
pressure, You can see the double stream moving past Congressman
Goldsborough’s statement regarding the infamy of national borrow-
ing.
Tn considering historic Periods you will note that Gesell and Douglas
focus attention on the nature of money, whereas both Marx and La
Tour du Pin were equally blind to the nature of money,
In contrast to the idiotic accumulation of debt by Roosevelt, observe
that if such government expenditure be necessary or advisable, the
direct payment of workers, etc., in stamp scrip would in eight years
consume itself, and leave the next decade free of all debt. The Roosevelt
system is either a fraud or a selling of the nation’s children into slavery
without the ghost of excuse.
Fifteen years ago the idea of governments distributing great masses
of purchasing power, would have seemed hazardous. England taxed
to the bone, swilling out millions in doles and in subsidies is in no
position to ridicule either Gesell or Major Douglas. Were the public
perceptive in any degree, they would by now be beginning to consider
at least some of the things Douglas, back in 1919, was predicting.
The demonstration (you can't call it an experiment) in Woérgl
should satisfy any sane man as to Gesell's workability, No ones denies
or denied what happened. All the murderers could do against the
Mayor of Woérgl was to damp down the news transmission. Senator
Bankhead rose to very considerable greatness in the debate on his Bill,
February 1932. After which ‘they’ must have ‘turned on the heat’.
The second most prominent American professor wrote me: ‘I don’t
think anyone here will touch it, but we are very glad you are going on
with it.’ That was before Dr. Hugo Fack started publishing Gesell in
San Antonio, Texas, with (naturally) ne financial support and no co-
operation from established publishers or the American publishing
system.
The truth about economics has had no warmer welcome than had
afew simple and known facts about the tradition in metric and poetry
during a couple of preceding decades. The parallel would be comic
were it not freighted with tragedy, death, malnutrition, degradation
of the national health in a dozen countries. No intelligent man will be
content to treat economics merely as economics, and probably no
writer could write anything of interest in so doing. The stupidities
taughtin our universities up till very recently amounted to little more
than treatises De Modo, that is to say they were confined mainly to the
topic of marketing, the habits of traders, as commented by Adam
Smith, ‘conspiring against the general public’.
Official philosophy had sunk equally low, If oikes was bastardised to
280

THE INDIVIDUAL IN HIS MILIEU
mean merely agora, the love of wisdom had been degraded to mean
merely the discussion of generalities, The nature of cliché or gener-
ality is to use a loose categorical label to cover a group or mass of
ignota, of unknown particulars, the attempt being to cover the
speaker's incompetence, laziness, ignorance or half-masted parroting.
Nothing breaks cliché or will break any writer’s use of it, save first-
hand knowledge of individual phenomena. (And in another dimen-
sion: rien ne pousse a la concision comme l‘abondance d‘idées.)
In another eighty years a few people may begin to see that the pre-
sent author's insistence on Ideogrammic method has not been mere
picking daisies. Fenollosa saw the possibilities of a method, The effects of
his vision were sabotaged right and left, and the small group of men
comprising ‘the learned world’ will some day feel a disgust for Paul
Carus in particular.
You can study economics almost entirely as dissociation of ideas.
It has not until now been so studied. For ten thousand bigots who
quote the Bible on work, there is scarcely one who will, or can, quote
it on usury. A mild old country priest said to me: ‘I suppose it must
have been along in the eighteenth century, they had to admit it.’
The Church of England has not to date found me a parson to say
when usury became Episcopal and respectable. Somewhere in the
time of Medici tropism the distinction between partaggio and usura was
muddled,
The increment of association is not usury. It exists. The English
Church dissociated work from employment, which latter implies the
sale of human energy usually under pressure.
E. S. Woodward in his Canada Reconstructed is still bubbling about
work, The facts giving rise to technocracy and substantiated in the
H. Loeb Chart of Plenty, haven't yet pulled E. S. W. out of that in-
herited mental habit.
You would think Gesellites would be more fully alive to the energy
in new money; since that is the main plank in their rectitude. You
would think they would see that land is progressively less important,
meaning less important now than before we had farm machinery or
the results of Mark Carleton’s research.
We cannot (let us grant it for all the grandsons who learned their
Henry George at mama's knee) dispense with land, and we are unlikely
to become orchids, even with the most active aeronautic and aero-
static inventions.
The earth has been under our feet for some ages, and into it we
return dead, bar cremation and deep sea drowning. Nothing is deader
than the reiteration of Henry George’s opinions, or his data on land
values and land speculation.
Given a tractless wilderness to begin on, and no intellectual needs
above those of a rural robot, there might be something left to be said
281

CIVILIZATION, MONEY AND HISTORY
for or about it, Grain, trees and vegetables must have earth wherein
to grow. We do not live by bread and synthetic products alone.
But on the whole the agriculturalist is a Producer and the world’s
problems today do not lie in production. As W. E. Woodward (not to
be confused with E. S, Woodward) has remarked: ‘Of course financing
should start with the consumer not with the producer. He (the pro-
ducer) doesn’t need any financing if there is a demand for his goods.’
(Demand here meaning if people who want 'em have the power to
buy 'em.)
Marx's thought did not stop during his lifetime. Disciples are more
trouble than they're worth when they start anchoring and petrifying
their mahatmas. No man’s thought petrifies. His own mind may decom-
pose, but if there is real thought, it continues, The Gesellites are loaded
up (like all groups) with a lot of dead baggage. It is not in group nature
to distinguish very clearly between the live and the dead part of their
equipment. The basket is, metaphorically, easier to handle than the
cat inside the basket, Hence the fugg of universities and of academic
abominations,
The land part of Gesellism may be all right, but it is right as a part
of the chronicles, of the history of where economics had, at a certain
date, got to.
E. S. Woodward's analysis of the present and infamous situation is
almost verbatim Douglas. Any unprejudiced observer with enough
patience will come out at the same place. The conspiracy of two and
two to make four, is bound to be in the long run, successful. The most
gross anomaly, and best illustration of sectarian muddle I know, was
offered by a Gesellist denying Douglas's ‘time lag’, whereas the whole
of Gesell’s monetary system is aimed at eliminating this specific defect
of the present system. Al, Einstein was nearly as funny, quoting
ro unconsciously under the impression that he was refuting
im.
It is inconceivable that Gesell could have lived another decade with-
out seeing that a great deal of the work wherefrom values rise, has
already been done, by our predecessors.
The quality of his mind was such that, once mentioned, this state of
things would have been self-evident to him; ditto the increment of
association,
it is impossible to imagine oneself making these statements to a
committee of Gesell, Marx and Lenin without their accepting them
almost instantly,
Itis equally impossible to imagine Aquinas, Scotus Erigena not doing
likewise,
You can not make good economics out of bad ethics,
282

Values
1 would put up a dozen brass tablets to one phrase of Constantin
Brancusi’s:
ONE OF THOSE DAYS WHEN | WOULD NOT HAVE GIVEN UP FIFTEEN MIN-
UTES OF MY TIME FOR ANYTHING UNDER HEAVEN?
There speaks the supreme sense of human values. There speaks
work unbartered, That is the yoice of humanity in its highest possible
manifestation.
* From Demarcations, British Union ? Quoted in Canto LXXXV, Ed.
Quarterly, January-April 1937,

For a New Paideuma’
he term Paideuma has been resurrected in our time because of
a need, The term Zeitgeist or Time Spirit might be taken to
include passive attitudes and aptitudes of an era, The term
Paideuma as used in a dozen German volumes has been given the
sense of the active element in the era, the complex of ideas which is in
a given time germinal, reaching into the next epoch, but conditioning
actively all the thought and action of its own time,
Frobenius has left the term with major implications in the uncon-
scious (if I understand him rightly). I don’t assert that he would
necessarily limit it to the unconscious or claim that the conscious
individual can have no effect in shaping the paideuma, or at least the
next paideuma.
I take it that the ‘indifferent have never made history’, and that the
paideuma makes history. There are in our time certain demands,
demands, that is, of the awakened intellect, and these demands are
specific, It is useless to discuss them ‘at large’ and in the vague if one
can't bring them down to particulars,
As a minimum for a decent education in our time, that is from
July 1937 onward, the following reforms must be made in all curricula,
ifthose curricula are to be considered henceforth as anything but dead
fish and red herring.
1, Economics can no longer be taught as a jumble of heteroclite
empiric statements. And no sane student will permit himself hence-
forth to be taught it in that manner, and no fond father will pay tui-
tion to have his son's mind muddled by the present asinine relics of
confusion. A student of the sciences is not prey to sectarians who
suppose that a discovery in physics, or a new mechanical device,
cancels out, or is in opposition to, the combination of a new chemical.
In Economics one demands that text-books start with a clear
definition of the terms, especially of the basic terms used (such as
money, credit, interest, usury).
One demands that the total problem of economy be defined, not
merely assumed. And this definition of the total problem must follow
the definition of the particular terms.
2.In Palaeography, whether literary, historicor musical, onedemands
asane use of photographic technique, which has now gone on to using
the cinema film, and reading from this film, or print of it, by an en-
4 The Criterion, January 1938.
284

FOR A NEW PAIDEUMA
larging machine, thus cutting the costs of adequate photographic
documentation from that of 8 by 10 inch or 6 by 4 plates, to that of the
normal film (or even the midget film), and bringing said costs within
range not only of ‘foundations’ but of commerce.
3, One demands, in the study of letters, a complete revision of
contrasts. It is sheer squalor to remain content with the worn down
remnants of renaissance culture.
If Greek awoke Europe in the fifteenth century, we have to a great
extent utilised and worn out that stimulus.
With no disrespect to the best Greek culture, but indeed with proper
respect, we should take stock of it. We should examine it in relation
to other cultures now known and available.
One can, without even learning the language, make an approximate
guess at its (the Greek) contents from the Loeb library. Given an
acquaintance with the language, even @ meagre acquaintance, no man
should imagine the Greek heritage as something to be thrown over-
board at the whim of any pragmatic vulgarian.
That however is no reason for not weighing it against other cultures.
As human contact a means of communication with 400,000,000 living
men, might seem to have certain advantages, balanced by the relative
worth of thetwocultures. No Sinologue has admitted that the Chinese
donation is less than the Greek. It has in our day a lure for the explora-
tive mind.
The man who doesn’t now want to learn ideogram is a man half-
awake. No one in Europe is in position to say whether Japan or China
contains, at the moment of writing, the greater cultural energy.
Evidence of Japanese awakeness I have on my desk as I write this,
I know of no group of poets in Europe or America as alert as Mr.
Kitasono’s Tokio friends. I mean to say as conscious of the day that we
live in. And this proves nothing whatever.
Lam sick of the pretences of clerics (in the university sense) who
continue to act as if the next generation should be content to know
no more than we do, or have their approach to full human culture as
inefficient and obstructed as ours was.
Homer was as Mediterranean as Greek, and the Greek authors went
down hill mostly after Homer.
Virgil is his inferior, but Latin gives us or has preserved a great deal
that is not in Greek,
The two donations can be weighed one against other. Since the
desuetude of Latin as an university language, I mean as a language
wherein instruction was given in classroom not used merely in the
study of ‘classic’ Latin authors, Europe has greatly forgotten all the
culture embodied in Latin writers who are not ‘classics’, meaning
who aren’t studied for their style or as part of ‘Latin literature courses’.
We can’t swallow this lacuna. It needs looking into.
285

CIVILIZATION, MONEY AND HISTORY
It is my firm belief that no study of Greek authors offers a fully
satisfactory alternative to reading of Tacitus, Catullus, Ovid, Proper-
tius. Απ also that a great deal of specific study of history and econo-
mics suffers from sheer ignorance of Latin predecessorsin thosespecific
fields.
Looking eastward even my own scant knowledge of ideogram has
been enough to teach me that a few hours’ work on itis more enliven-
ing, goes further to jog a man out of fixations than a month's work on
a great Greek author. I don’t know how long such enlivenment would
endure. At the moment I see no end to it, but I assert that for Europe
and for occidental man there is here an admirable means of getting
out of his ruts and his stupidities,
The Sinologues have been either too uninterested in the subject or
too lacking in civil imagination to see what this treasure can mean to
total Europe.
A man of fifty has a right to stop picking daisies and think what he
would like to teach the next generation, he has a right to take stock
of what he doesn’t know and would like to.
A sane university curriculum will put Chinese where Greek was,
or at least put it in the smaller position whereto Greek has now fallen,
that is as a luxury study,
An alert University (speaking of the possible and non-existent)
would set its cultural faculty to examining ex nove the merits of the
authors taught in its (usually uncorrelated) courses in letters and
language.
For thirty or more years an occasional pedagogue, usually German,
has murmured a few words about comparative literature, but the
study has not been enlivened.
France has so recently ceased being the whole hog and centre of
European culture that one can’t probably offer any suggestions to the
Sorbonne, one can only marvel at the laxity and lack of serious criteria
that crop up, or that have on occasion cropped up, in particular
Sorbonne courses, and publications.
In Italy where they go about organising, and taking education sul
serio there will or will not (as the case may be) occur a revision. Either
Italian authors and pedagogues will renovate their curriculum of
Italian authors, or they will drop out of, or remain far in the rear of,
an era they have never yet joined,
Mediaeval poetry rose in Provence, Italy was at the top for an epoch
(of Cavalcanti and Dante), Nobody outside Italy has ever supposed
that Italian drama or Italian novels were serious concurrents for total
primacy. Italy has, on the other hand, a vast amount of secondary,
solid and meritorious work on special topics, which has scarcely been
recognised, or at any rate, never at its full value, and I think never used
as corrective acid on French pretensions.
286

FOR A NEW PAIDEUMA
“What needs my Shakespeare? etc.”
People who are determined to know only one language must be
content to know that their estimate of books applies to books in that
language, with a penumbra of books translated, which latter can be
weighed only as books in the language whereinto.
As attempt to locate the foregoing, it might be inexact to say that
the war was the end of French culture. Phases end. The few people
who are willing to consider symptoms even though they appear on the
surface irrelevant to, say, the strength of a nation, might be persuaded
to reflect on the fact that when Rémy de Gourmont died there
remained no one in Paris whom I could trust for a monthly letter to
the Little Review. | mean there was no French writer with critical appara-
tus and a general awareness both of land of origin and country shes.
to, which fitted him to send us the news of French thought and French
publication.
When the Dial readers later wanted ‘something from an actual
Frenchman’ they succeeded in getting journalism and infantile
reminiscence of Sarah Bernhardt. Yet the mind of Paris was far from
dead.
The Trial of Barrés was a definite intellectual act. Picabia’s tremendous
phrase, ‘Europe exhausted by the conquest of Alsace-Lorraine’ ought
to have enlightened more men than it did. All war in Europe is civil
war from henceforth, it is a man tearing at his own viscera.
It is in perspective four centuries since Milan declined to make war
on Venice, on ground that war between buyer and seller could profit
neither. Ideas do not go into mass action the day they are born,
All of which thoughts are driven into me yet again by the chicken-
headedness of red propaganda. Mr. Tzara was dada, Gide was born
Gide and will die Gide, Mr. Aragon did not in the old days keep up
with Picabia.
He has been told that economics exist; that economic forces enter
into the social problem, but this notion does not, apparently enter the
red mind at all. Vide Russia, etc. We are, I suppose all of us, bombarded
by red, pink, orange manifestos. And we might go back to the Trial of
Barrés for a perspective. Perhaps ‘Paris’ (Paris of books and young men,
and of now a new set of still more immature adolescents) has forgotten
it, and it needs in any case exposition for the English and American
reader.
It was a show, as I remember it, in a smallish hall near the Boulevard
‘Mich’. M. Aragon in legal robes as prosecutor, Barrés a wax barber's
dummy, and Aragon talked too long. He wore out the audience.
That isn’t essential. The drama existed when, I think it was, Eluard (it
may have been Crevel) came on in a gas mask. That was the antithesis,
the dead rhetoric vs, the cannon fodder. A system of clichés had
287

CIVILIZATION, MONEY AND HISTORY
broken down. A bit of stale gas had been left in the mask and the pro-
tagonist at a certain point nearly suffocated, could stand it no longer,
and tore off the mask. One very red faced real youth sputtering in the
stage set. 2
It ought to have made people think more, At any rate I take it no one
actually in the hall has forgotten it. Mme. Rachilde was indignant.
All this was seventeen years ago.
France has built nothing whatever on it. (Unless we count ‘young’
Rostand’s Marckands de Canons.) Any man who thinks in our time and
who reads any respectable part of serious controversy and of the all too
sincere ranting put out by a dozen parties, ought to start sorting out
the confusions. Against which sea there is no dyke save a clear ter-
minology.
The ranting, be it about Spain, Russia, France or economy, shows
utter failure to dissociate:
1. credit from money (corollary: social credit from social money
which is not the same thing);
2. social credit from anti-social credit.
The divers empiric sects have not been diligent in correlating their
notions, ideas, discoveries with known history, knowable history or
the sound thought in other camps.
You have two (I think only two) main groups of actors: you have
those who keep murmuring ‘It isn't wholly a money problem.’
You have those (at diametric opposite) who keep murmuring what
amounts to an assertion that ‘You can cureit without any sort of guild
organisation’.
The magnanimous observer ought to ask himself whether at least
some attention ought not to be given both to possible organisations
and to money. Recognising that organisation will be part of historic
process growing out of places and customs, and not merely put on
like a top hat or a pair of braces.
The guild idea seems incompatible with the English or American
temperament. Neither country can even set up an academy, foregoing
attempts have been travesty. Our social dilemma is: can monetary
reform be instituted without some form or at least adumbration of
guild organisations correlated to a centre?
An intelligentsia unable to organise itself will be able to organise
others?
Can one even introduce the discussion of literary organisation in
good company without being thought daft? Can one even indicate
errors in immature attempts? Such as the something or other in
America which treats writing as production of a trade commodity
instead of as a communications service?
Starting with the idea that writing is communication I see but one
288

FOR A NEW PAIDEUMA
valid and viable form of literary guild. The natural nuclei are groups,
hitherto utterly informal. If the nuclei be formed merely on geo-
graphic basis they will remain as ineffective as they have hitherto been,
and as powerless to defend or foster the members of ‘our craft’, let
alone powerless of participation in a general social order.
If on the other hand it were possible for writers of different tenden-
cies to organise on their own bases, say, writers desiring a parochial
criterion gathered about their ‘leaders’, and writers desiring an inter-
national or metropolitan about theirs, there would be at least some
articulation. A guild nucleus could conceivably start with five or six
men who might associate without feeling ridiculous, it could admit
applicants according to its own criteria, and such centred groups
might conceivably after considerable interval be correlated into a
sindicato which would have some vitality. ‘Our’ hope being that the
mutual disagreements between the silly, the stupid, the trashy guilds
would more or less cross out and that the valid would have some sort
of chance when things (if ever) came to a vote.
Vast American endowments remain a hangover of an earlier era,
ineffective because their choice of candidates is entrusted to unfit
persons. A new appeal on my desk suggests a group of twelve to pass
on six appointments. This would be no better than the present foun-
dations. The only chance for a real writer would occur if the twelve
were divided into six groups, each pair selecting a candidate.
The attempt to organise letters along the lines of a system started
in the plumbing trade a century ago, seems to me inept. I can't see
that old style trade unionism offers us a solution. I can see a slim
chance of slight amelioration if the organisers attended a little to the
nature of the writer as such, allowing for considerable variety and not
trying to jam all the divers endocrine species of ‘writers’ into one
straitjacket.
The question for writers in the Anglo-American idioms may be for
our time a mere exotic, dragged in by analogy from more highly
organised states.
What can not be dismissed as merely exotic is the state of our
terminology. This is part of our job as writers. Our gross (in general)
insensitivity to the personality of men in ‘high official’ status in what-
ever formal intellectual organisations who have for our sorrow been
‘wished on us’ by wool-headed forebears, or the general lack of mental
discipline in high civic places, cannot be dismissed as exotic.

What is money for?*
e will never see an end of ructions, we will never have a sane
and steady administration until we gain an absolutely clear
conception of money. I mean an absolutely not an approxi-
mately clear conception,
Ican, if you like, go back to paper money issued in China in or about
A.D. 840, but we are concerned with the vagaries of the Western World.
First, Paterson, the founder of the ‘Bank of England’, told his
shareholders that they would profit because ‘the bank hath profit on
the interest of all the moneys which it creates out of nothing’.
What then is this ‘money’ the banker can create ‘out of nothing’?
(1) MEASURE OF PRICE
Let us be quite clear.
MONEY IS A ‘MEASURED’ TITLE OR CLAIM.
That is its basic difference from unmeasured claims, such as a man’s
right to take all you've got, under war-time requisition or as an in-
vader or thief just taking it all.
Money is a measure which the taker hands over when he acquires
the goods he takes, And no further formality need occur during the
transfer, though sometimes a receipt is given.
The idea of justice inheres in ideas of measure, and money is a measure
of price.
(2) MEANS OF EXCHANGE
Money is valid when people recognise it as a claim and hand over
goods or do work up to the amount printed on the face of the ‘ticket’,
whether it is made of metal or paper.
Money is a general sort of ticket, which is its only difference from a
railway or theatre ticket. If this statement seems childish let the reader
think for a moment about different kinds of tickets.
A railway ticket is a measured ticket. A ticket from London to
Brighton differs from one for London to Edinburgh. Both are mea-
sured, but in miles that always stay the same length. A money ticket,
under a corrupt system, wobbles. For a long time the ‘public’ has
trusted people whose measure was shifty.
11939.
290

WHAT IS MONEY FOR?
Another angle. Theatre tickets are timed. You would probably not
accept a ticket for Row H, Seat 27, if it were not dated. When six
people are entitled to the same seat at the same time the tickets are not
particularly good. (Orage asked: ‘Would you call it inflation, if there
were a ticket for every seat in the house?)
You will hear money called a ‘medium of exchange’, which means
that it can circulate freely, as a measure of goods and services against
one another, from hand to hand.
(3) GUARANTEE OF FUTURE EXCHANGE
We will have defined money properly when we have stated what it
is in words that can Nort be applied to anything else and when there
is nothing about the essential nature of money that is omitted from
our definition.
When Aristotle calls money ‘a guarantee of future exchange’ that
merely means that it is an undated ticket, that will be good when we
want to use it,
Tickets have sometimes stayed good for a century.
When we do not hand over money at once for goods or services
received we are said to have ‘credit’. The ‘credit’ is the other man’s
belief that we can and will some time hand over the money ox some-
thing measured by money.
PURPOSE OF MONEY
Most men have been so intent on the individual piece of money, as
a measure, that they have forgotten its rurrosE, and they have got
into inextricable muddles and confusions regarding the ToraL amount
of money in a country.
A perfectly good hammer is useless to pick your teeth with. If you
don’t know what money is ror, you will get into a muddle when
using it, and still more will a government get into a mess in its
‘monetary policy’.
Statally speaking, that is from the point of view of a man or party
that wants to govern justly, a piece of money is a ticket, the country’s
money is a mass of tickets for getting the country’s food and goods
justly distributed.
The job for a man today who is trying to write a pamphlet on
money is not to say something new, it is stmrcy to make a clear state-
ment about things that have been known for 200, and often for 2,000
years.
You have got to know what money is For.
If you think that it is a man-trap or a means of bleeding the public
291

CIVILISATION, MONEY AND HISTORY
you will admire the banking system as run by the Rothschilds and
international bankers. If you think it is a means of sweating profits
out of the public, you will admire the stock exchange.
Hence ultimately for the sake of keeping your ideas in order you
will need a few principles.
THE AIM of a sane and decent economic system is to fix things so that
decent people can eat, have clothes and houses up to the limit of
available goods.
THE VALUE OF MONEY
‘Take money IN SUCH A SYSTEM as a means of exchange, and then
realise that to be a just means of exchange it must be MEASURED.
What are you going to usr to measure the value of anything?
An egg is an egg. You can eat it (until it goes bad). Eggs are not all the
same size, but they might serve among primitive people as an approxi-
mate measure,
Unterguggenberger, the Austrian monetary reformer, used work
as a measure, ‘Arbeitswert’, 10 schillings’ worth of work. That was
o.x. in a mountain valley where everyone could do pretty much the
same kind of work in the fields.
Charlemagne had a grain measure, so many pecks of barley, wheat
or rye worth a DENAR, or put it the other way on. The just price of
barley was so much the peck.
In a.D. 796 it was 2 denars,
And in a.p. 808 it was 3 denars.
That means that the farmer got Mone denars for the same quantity
of barley, And let us hope that he could buy more other goods with
those denars,
Unfortunately the worth of all things depends on whether there is
a real scarcity, enough or more than can be used at a given time.
A few eggs are worth a great deal to a hungry man on a raft,
Wheat is worth more in terms of serge in some seasons than in
others. So is gold, so is platinum.
A single commodity (eveN Goup) base for money is not satisfactory.
STATE AUTHORITY behind the printed note is the best means of
establishing a jusr and HONEST currency.
The Chinese grasped that over 1,000 years ago, as we can see from
the Tang starr (not Bank) Nore,
SOVEREIGNTY inheres in the right to issue money (tickets) and to
determine the value thereof,
American interests Hipe the most vital clause in our constitution.
The American government hasn't, they say, the right to fix prices.
BUT IT HAS THE RIGHT TO DETERMINE THE VALUE OF MONEY and this right
is vested in Congress.
292

WHAT IS MONEY FOR?
This is a mere difference in legal formalities and verbal arrange-
ments.
The U.S, Government has the right to say ‘a dollar is one wheat-
bushel thick, it is one serge-foot long, it is ten gallons of petrol wide.’
Hence the U.S. Government could establish the yusr price, and a
just price system,
THE JUST PRICE
Out of barter grew the canonist doctrine of the just price, and a
thousand years’ thought from St, Ambrose to St, Antonio of Florence,
as to HOW to determine the just price.
Both the Douglas Social Crediters and modern Catholics rosrutats
the JUST PRICE as a necessary part of their systems. The valid complaint
against Douglas is that he didn’t invent and set up machinery for
ENFORCING the just price. A priest recently reported to me that the
English distributists had about got round to realising that they had no
mechanism for instituting and enforcing just price,
Only the strate can effectively fix the yust rrick of any commodity
by means of state-controlled pools of raw products and the restoration
of guild organisation in industry.
THE QUANTITY OP MONEY
Having determined the size of your dollar, or half-crown or shilling,
your Government's next job is to see that TICKETS are properly printed
and that they get to the right people.
The right people are all the people who are not engaged in crime,
and crime for the duration of this pamphlet means among other
things CHEATING the rest of the citizens through the money racket.
In the United States and England there is Nor enough money.
There are not enough tickets moving about among the wHoLe people
to suy what they need-sven when the goods are there on the counter
or going to rot on the wharves,
When the total nation hasn’t or cannot obtain enough food for its
people, that nation is poor. When enough food exists and people
cannot get it by honest labour, the state is rotten, and no effort of
language will say how rotten it is.
But for a banker or professor to tell you that the country cannot
do this, that or the other because it lacks money is as black and foetid
a lie, as grovelling and imbecile, as it would be to say it cannot build
roads because it has no kilometres! (I didn’t invent that phrase, but it
is too good to leave idle.)
293

CIVILISATION, MONEY AND HISTORY
Roosevelt and his professors were on the right line with their
commodity dollar. sut they hooeyed and smoke-screened and dodged
the problem of having ENouGH Tickers to serve the whole people, and
of keeping those tickets MovING.
It is the business of the state to sec that there is enough money
in the hands of the wHoir people, and in adequately rapid EXCHANGE,
to effect distribution of all wealth produced and produceable.
Until every member of the nation eats three times a day and has
shelter and clothing, a nation is either lazy or unhealthy. If this occurs
in a rich state the state's riches are ‘not fully employed’.
SOCIAL CREDIT
All value comes from labour and nature. Wheat from ploughing,
chestnuts from being picked up.
sur a lot of work has been done by men (mostly inventors, well-
diggers, constructors of factory plant, etc.) now DEAD, and who there-
fore can NoT eat and wear clothes.
In respect of this legacy of mechanical efficiency and scientific
advance we have at our disposal a large volume of sociat CREDIT,
which can be distributed to the people as a bonus over and above their
wage packet,
Douglas proposed to bring up the Torar purchasing power of the
whole people by a per capita issue of tickets PROFORTIONAL to available
goods. In England and U.S. today available and desired goods remain
unbought because the total purchasing power (i.e. total sum of
tickets) is inadequate."
Mussolini and Hitler wasted very little time rrorostnc. They started
and po distribute sor tickets and actual goods on various graduated
scales according to the virtues and activities of Italians and Germans.
Douglas may object that this is not ‘democratic’ (that is egalitarian)
nut for the monetary scientist or economist the result is the same.
The goods are getting distributed.
There isa slightly different angle in the way these different men look
on justice, They all agree that deficiency in a nation’s total purchas-
ing power must be made up. Ten or more years ago I said that Musso-
lini had achieved more than Douglas, because Douglas has presented
his ideas as a greed system, not as a will system.
Both systems, Fascist and Douglasite, differ as the day from night
from the degradation of the pote, from the infamy of the British
system wherein men who are out of jobs are paid money taken from
men who do work, and where the out-of-works are rendered pro-
gressively UNFIT to work or to enjoy the sensations of living.
1 1939,
294

WHAT IS MONEY FOR?
Not only are they a drag on workers, but they are made a drag on
all people who are trying to maintain a decent standard of living.
The whole scale of values is defiled. Every year sees less sense of soctat
VALUE; less sense of having people lead lives which do not harm others;
of lives in which some measure and prudence is observed.
There is nothing new in creating money to distribute wealth,
If you don’t believe the Emperor Tching Tang issued the first
national dividend in 1766 n.c. you can call it something else. It may
have been an emergency dole, but the story will at least clear up one
muddle. The emperor opened a copper mine and issued round coins
with square holes and gave them to the poor ‘and this money enabled
them to buy grain from the rich’, but it had no effect on the general
shortage of grain.
That story is 3,000 years old, but it helps one to understand what
money is and what it can do. For the purpose of good government it
is a ticket for the orderly distribution of wHaT Is AVAILABLE, It may even
be an incentive to grow or fabricate more grain or goods that is, to
attain abundance, But it is Nor in itself abundance,
INFLATION
The term ‘inflation’ is used as a bogey to scare people away from any
expansion of money at all.
Real INFLATION only begins when you issue Money (measured claims)
against goods or services that are undeliverable (assignats of the French
Revolution issued against the state lands) or issue them in excess of
those WANTED,
That amounts to saying: two or more tickets for the same seat at the
same time, or tickets in London for a theatre performance tonight in
Bombay, or for a dud show.
money can be expended as long as each measured claim can be
honoured by the producers and distributors of the nation in goods
and services required by the public, when and where they want them.
GESELL’S STAMP SCRIP
INFLATION is one danger: STAGNATION is another.
Gesell, the South American monetary reformer, saw the danger of
money being hoarded and proposed to deal with it by the issue of
‘stamp scrip’, This should be a government note requiring the bearer
to affix a stamp worth up to 1 per cent of its face value on the first day
of every month. Unless the note carries its proper complement of
monthly stamps it is not valid.
This is a form of Tax on money and in the case of British currency
might take the form of 3d. or Id. per month on a ten shilling note,
295

CIVILISATION, MONEY AND HISTORY
d 1d. or 2d. on a pound. There are any number of possible taxes,
it Gesell’s kind of tax can only fall on a man who has, in his pocket,
the moment the tax falls due, 100 times, at least, the amount of the tax.
Gesell’s kind of money provides a medium and measure of exchange
hich cannot be hoarded with impunity. It will always keep moving.
inkers could Nor lock it up in their cellars and charge the public
r letting it out. It has also the additional benefit of placing the sellers
‘perishable goods at less of a disadvantage in negotiating with owners
theoretically imperishable money.
I am particularly keen on Gesell, because once people have used
amp scrip they Have a clear idea about money. They understand
-kets better than men who haven't used stamp scrip. 1am no more
Ἰχίους than anyone else to use a new kind of stamp, but I maintain
at the public is Nor too stupid to use postage stamps and that there
no gain in pretending that they are too stupid to understand money.
I don’t say you have to use Gesell’s method. But once you under-
and wiy he wanted it you will not be fleeced by bank sharks and
nonetary authorities’ wirHOUT KNOWING HOW you are being fleeced.
hat is way Gesell is so useful as a school teacher. He proposed a very
mple means of keeping his tickets moving.
STATAL MONEY
1 1816 Thomas Jefferson made a basic statement that has Not been
roperly digested, let alone brought into perspective with various
nodern proposals’ for special improvements of the present damned
ad destructive ‘system’ or money racket.
The reader had better rrame Jefferson’s statement:
*,.. And if the national bills issued be bottomed (as is cee:
on pledges of specific taxes for their redemption within certain an
moderate epochs, and be of proper denominations for circulation, no interest
on them would be necessary or just, because they would answer to
every one of the purposes of metallic money withdrawn and re-
placed by them.’
Jefferson to Crawford, 1816.
Jefferson's formula is sovip. tF the state emits ENOUGH money for
alid and justifiable expenses and keeps it moving, circulating, going
ut the front door and coming in the tax window, the nation will not
iffer stagnation.
The issue of HONEST MONEY is a service, and when the state performs
his service the state has a right to a just recompense, which differs
‘om nearly all known forms of tax.
I say ‘when the state issues it,’ because when states are weak or
icompetent or their issue inadequate, individuals and congeries of
296

WHAT IS MONEY FOR?
men or localities Have quite properly taken over this activity (or have
retained it from pre-statal eras), and it is better, it is in fact necessary,
that the function of the measure of exchange should be carried on
than that it stop or break down altogether.
On the other hand a nation whose measure of exchange is at the
mercy of forces oursipe the nation, is a nation in peril, it is a nation
without national sovereignty. It is a nation of incompetent idiots
drifting to ruin.
Let us repeat.
Sovereignty inheres in the right to 1ssuz measured claims to wealth,
that is MONEY.
No part or function of government should be under closer surveil-
lance, and in no part or cranny of government should higher moral
criteria be ASSURED,
STATAL MONEY based upon national wealth must replace GoLp mani-
puiated by international usurers.
NECESSARY SAFEGUARDS
The sane order in founding a dynasty or reorganising a government is
FIRST to get the results, that is to see that the people are fed and
housed,
THEN so to regulate the mechanism of distribution (monetary sys-
tem or whatever) that it will not fall into decay and be pilfered.
For example J. Q. Adams, one of the American founders, had some
nice socialist or statal ideas about reserving the national wealth for
educational and ‘higher purposes’. His proposals were UNTIMELY.
Jackson opened the land: settlers could go and take quite a bit each,
free and gratis. It was timely and useful. But no provision was made to
prevent the settlers transferring this land wHEN THEY HAD NO FURTHER
USE FOR IT and didn't want to work it themselves. Hence the U.S. Jand
has fallen into great ownership.
The same danger applies to monetary systems as to land settlement.
Set up a perfect and just money system and in three days rascals,
the bastards with mercantilist and monopolist mentality, will start
thinking up some wheeze to cheat the people. The concession hunter
will sprout in some new form as long as dung stinks and humanity
produces mental abortions.
John Adams early saw that stock jobbers would replace fat country
small squire tyrants.
In the 1860’s one of the Rothschilds was kind enough to admit that
the banking system was contrary to public interest, and that was before
the shadow of Hitler’s jails had fallen acnoss the family fortunes.
It is this generation’s job to do what was left undone by the early
democrats. The guild system, endowing the people by occupation
297

CIVILISATION, MONEY AND HISTORY
id vocation with corporate powers, gives them means to protect
yemselves for all time from the money power,
If you don’t like the guild idea, go get results with some other, but
on't lose your head and forget what clean men are driving at.
And don't lie to yourselves and mistake a plough for a mortgage
ad vice versa,
AN ECONOMIC SYSTEM
is useless to talk of economics or to listen to talk about economics
r to read books on the subject until both reader and writer know
‘hat they mean by the half-dozen simplest and most necessary terms
nost frequently used.
‘The first thing for a man to think of when proposing an economic
ystem is: WHAT 1S 1T FOR?
And the answer is: to make sure that the whole people shall be able
» eat (in a healthy manner), to be housed (decently) and be clothed
in a way adequate to the climate).
Another form of that statement is Mussolini’s:
DISCIPLINE THE ECONOMIC FORCES AND EQUATE THEM TO THE NEEDS OF
HE NATION.
USURY
‘he Left claim that private ownership has destroyed this true purpose
f an economic system, Let us see how OWNERSHIP was defined at the
eginning of a capitalist era during the French Revolution.
ownensui? ‘is the right which every citizen has to enjoy and dispose
f the portion of goods guaranteed him by the law. The right of
»wnership is limited, as are all other rights, by the obligation to respect
he rights of others. It cannot be prejudicial to the safety, nor to the
iberty, nor to the existence, nor to the ownership of other men like
urselves. Every possession, every traffic, which violates this principle is
licit and immoral.‘—Robespierre.
The perspective of the damned nineteenth century shows little else
han the violation of these principles by demoliberal usurocracy. The
loctrine of Capital, in short, has shown itself as little else than the
dea that unprincipled thieves and anti-social groups should be allowed
‘© gnaw into the rights of ownership.
This tendency ‘to gnaw into’ has been recognised and stigmatised
rom the time of the laws of Moses and he called it neschek.
And nothing differs more from this gnawing or corrosive than the
‘ight to share out the fruits of a common co-operative labour.
Indeed usury has become the dominant force in the modern world,
‘Moreover, imperialism is an immense accumulation of money
:apital in a few countries, which as we have seen, amounts to 4 or 5
298

WHAT IS MONEY FOR?
thousand million pounds sterling in securities. Hence the extra-
ordinary growth of a class, or rather a stratum, of rentiers, i.e. persons
who live by ‘clipping coupons’, who take absolutely no part in any
enterprise, and whose profession is idleness. The exportation of capital,
one of the most essential economic bases of imperialism, still further
isolates this rentier stratum from production, and sets the seal of para-
sitism on the whole country living on the exploitation of labour of
several overseas countries and colonies.’
V.1. Lenin, quoting Hobson, in
‘Imperialism, the highest stage of Capitalism’.
Very well! That is from Lenin. But you could quote the same
substance from Hitler, who is a Nazi (note the paragraph from ‘Mein
Kampf" magnificently isolated by Wyndham Lewis in his ‘Hitler’:
‘The struggle against international finance and loan capital has
become the most important point in the National Socialist pro-
gramme: the struggle of the German nation for its independence
and freedom.”
You could quote it from Mussolini, a fascist, from C. H. Douglas,
who calls himself a democrat and his followers the only true demo-
crats. You could quote it from McNair Wilson, who is a Christian
Monarchy man, You could quote it from a dozen camps which have
no suspicion that they are quoting Lenin.
The only people who do nor seem to have read and digested this
essay of his are the British Labour Party and various groups of profes-
sing communists throughout the Occident.
Some facts are now known above parties, some perceptions are the
common heritage of all men of good will, and only the Jewspapers
and worse than Jewspapers, try now to obscure them. Among the
worse than Jewspapers we must list the hired professors who misteach
new generations of young, who lie for hire and who continue to lie
from sheer sloth and inertia and from dog-like contempt for the well-
being of all mankind.
At this point, and to prevent the dragging of red-herrings, I wish to
distinguish between prejudice against the Jew as such and the sugges-
tion that the Jew should face his own problem.
1 Pound has defined his attitude to saxon to revile the Jew for beating
the Jews and usury elsewhere. In The him at his own game.’
Guide to Kulchur (1938) he wrote: Some sentences Pound wrote in
‘The red herring is scoundrel's The New English Weekly should also be
device and usurer’s stand-by. ... read in this context:
Race prejudice is red herring. The ‘Tour du Pin curses usury. He
tool of the man defeated intellec- baptises the XIXth century the
tually, and of the cheap politician “Age of Usury”. He says several
… It is nonsense for the anglo- good things in so doing.
299

CIVILISATION, MONEY AND HISTORY
pors he in his individual case wish to observe the law of Moses?
Does he propose to continue to rob other men by usury mechanism
hile wishing to be considered a ‘neighbour’?
This is the sort of double-standard which a befouled English dele-
tion tried to enforce via the corrupt League of Nations (frontage and
ce wash for the worst international corruption at Basel.)
usury is the cancer of the world, which only the surgeon's knife of
scism can cut out of the life of nations,
APPENDIX
(Some quotes and observations.)
‘The banking business is declared a state monopoly,’
Lenin, Krylenko, Podvolsky, Gorbunov.
hich, of course, means ‘all power’ the state.
2. ‘Discipline the economic forces and equate them to the needs of
nation,’
Mussolini, Consegna for the year XII.
3. ‘Problems of production solved, economists prodded on by the
ate should next solve the problem of distribution.’
Ibid.
4. Rossoni, Italian Minister, indicates the policy of ammassi, or
semblages of grain with possibilities of a totally different tax system
kind.
nore that extortion has often consisted in forcing men to pay in
substance or via a medium (money) which they have not and which
ey are forced to obtain at an unjust price.
5. Bankhead proposed Stamp Scrip in the US. Senate, possibly the
He then without documents or It cannot be too clearly known
much detail, blames the Jews for that no man can take usury and
Aryan inability to think clearly. observe the law of the Hebrews. No
This runs back into retrospect, the orthodox Jew can take usury with-
Templars, ete. He blames the Jews out sin, as defined in his own
equally for Calvin and for Voltaire, scriptures.
Taking it impartially 2s a trans— The Jew usurer being an outlaw
pontine Confucian I fail to see why runs against his own people, and
the Jews should commit race sui- uses them as his whipping boy. ...
cide merely because Aryans can’t But the Jew is the usurer’s goat.
think clearly. And I still more Whenever a usurer is spotted he
emphatically fail to see why any scuttles down under the ghetto
Jew should be expected to think and leaves the plain man Jew to take
50." the bullets and beatings,
American Notes, 18 April 1935, All hostilities are grist to the
"Usurers have no race. How long usurer, all racial hates wear down
the whole Jewish people is to be A TA
sacrificial goat for the usurer, 1 American Notes, 21 November 1935.
know not....

WHAT IS MONEY FOR?
only 100 per cent honest monetary proposal made in U.S. legislature
ἐπεὶ a) Ls civilisation was destroyed by and after the Civil War
1861-5).
6. Daladier, whatever his errors, proposed Stamp Scrip in a French
Radical Party assembly, possibly the only 100 per cent honest monetary
proposal made in that worm-eaten and miserable country since Nec-
ker brought in his vermin, and since the Banque de France was riveted
on the back of the people.
These statements should be faced and either verified or disproved.
A very great and slimy ignorance persists. American concerns hire
the lowest grade of journalists to obscure the public mind. Are we
to suppose that neither employer nor writer know that wages are paid
in money; that dividends are paid in money; that raw materials and
finished products are bought with money?
As for prize lies there is no ascertainable limit from the ‘Saturday
Evening Post's’ ‘Kreuger is more than a financial titan’ to the daily and
hourly pronouncements of the British ‘statesmen’ and press.
ON ENGLAND
So far as I know no 100 per cent honest monetary policy has been
officially proposed in the British Parliament since the Bank of England
was founded, Nor has any of the larger religious bodies in England
come out for common monetary honesty.
Your tax system is an infamy. The farm hand does not eat more
because the paintings by Raeburn or Constable are taken out of the
Manor House and put in the dealer's cellar under a black and iniqui—
tous inheritance tax.
The obscuring of the sense of the Nature of money has destroyed
all these fine things usetessty, The dismantled Manor House, that
could be and ought to show a model of how to live, is made a skeleton
for NO PURPOSE.
If any hedger, or ditcher got a half-ounce more beefsteak because
the Manor House library was sold off and its pictures put up to auction,
there might be some justification in taxes. But there is No justification
in taxes as now suffered in Britain.
FOR ARKANSAS
‘In Mississippi the average cotton farmer makes four bales of cotton
a year worth, at the present market, 42.50 dollars a bale. This is 170
dollars for a year’s work. A daughter of this family averaging 12 dollars
a week in a nearby industrial plant earns 624 dollars for a year’s work,
over three times the income from the farm’.
-Thus the ‘Commonwealth College Fortnightly’
of Mena, Arkansas. 1 March 1938,
301

CIVILISATION, MONEY AND HISTORY
Hence the claims that ‘money isn’t all’ and that ‘it is not exclusively
monetary problem.”
You could have a just and stable coinage; measured by eggs, by
ork or by a logarithmic price-index, and that FARMER could sritt get
ily 42.50 dollars per bale and be unable to grow more cotton per acre.
Will this statement content my bolshevik friends in Arkansas and
gents who think | am concerned so.eLy with money?
302

Freedom de Facto’
[Free speech without freedom of radio is a mere goldfish in a
bowl.
E.P. in The Townsman, June 1940}
! he incapacity of abstract statement to retain meaning or utility
is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in the declaration of
the rights of man, The definition of liberty therein contained
seems at first sight perfect: Liberty is the right to do anything that does
not injure others (qui ne muit pas anx autres).
It is among the best formulations of principle that mankind has
produced and it has led to unending quibble and distortion and sophis-
try as to what does actually injure others.
Mankind‘s muddle is not merely a muddle in his ideas but a muddle
as to the very nature of ideas. The possession of ideas even of the ‘right
ideas’ is no indication that a man understands anything or at any rate
it is a very imperfect indication. A man with the ‘wrong ideas’ or a
man whose verbal manifestations appear inexact may often under-
stand things quite well,
For example Levy-Bruhl has a number of excellent ideas about
savages and primitive language, but he leaves no conviction that he
understands savages. In fact he spends a good deal of space definitely
stating that these things are pretty much incomprehensible to civilised
man,
He may do this from excess of scruple or because he is writing for
logic-chopping Frenchmen or because he is really intelligent and
wants at any price or at a great price to keep the reader from thinking
he understands the matter before he has got to the gist of it.
On the other hand one never doubts Frobenius’ understanding,
even though academic persons may have found his ideas, or the verbal
manifestation of such ideas, wild or ‘poetic’.
The understanding of things implies a quick and ready perception
of when the given case fits the general formula. The major part of all
work in the civil courts consists in the endeavour to determine when
the ‘given case’ fits the general principle or its legal formulation.
Talk of Liberty usually begins in great ignorance of what we have of
it and what we should have, and of what we could, under abnormal
circumstances, exercise for a limited time.
1 Written e. 1940-1, First published Agenda, 1971.
303

CIVILISATION, MONEY AND HISTORY
Michelet’s name is not, I believe, fashionable in current discussions
but parts of his method might still serve in determining the actual
state of society, At any rate functioning society consists of, first,
a ‘small number of people’ who make the future; whose opinion
passes ultimately as indicative of the time (e.g. the encyclopaedists,
Bayle or Rabelais) or at any rate it is registered as ‘the best thought of
the time’,
In our time no one knows what properly belongs to the state and
what to the individual, There are monolinear doctrinaires with one
remedy for everything and there is a great mass of people who think
that there is a known answer to this problem, But the answer is not
known and the hardest thinking of everyone capable of thinking at all
will not manage to find the answer in a hurry.
It is quite possible that we have already attained the maximum
liberty compatible with civilisation. It has also been stated that ‘all our
liberties are surreptitious’.
It appears to me that ‘the small number of people’ recognise neither
church nor state when it comes to a matter of their own personal
conduct.
‘This fact is neither trivial nor insignificant. It does not mean that the
‘small number of people’ is either frivolous or irresponsible.
The ‘small number’ that | am considering is usually very thought-
ful. They have formulated or accepted a fixed or an experimental
individual code and govern themselves accordingly, They do not
interfere with the actions of others and if they pass judgment on others
they do not express it. They assume that our knowledge of other
people's actions is of necessity incomplete.
Most of these people have paid ‘the price’ or a price usually fairly
heavy. I have seldom heard them uttering ululations. Neither have I
heard them preaching doctrines or suggesting that their line of con-
duct should be followed by everyone else.
Even when unformulated or unanalyzed this silence is logical and
rises from perception of the difference between Greek law and Roman.
Roman law being in intention right for the majority of cases and Greck
law being supposedly adapted to fit the individual case however
fantastic.
Sane man does not try to erect a principle out of an exceptional
circumstance, The: doctrinaire has, historically speaking, usually
failed to differentiate the exceptional case, but the fault of nearly all
social and economic thought has been deeper down than that. —
Human theorising has proceeded from an Euclidian stasis, from
statecraft to music the theoreticians have dealt with a still world, and
received derision, quite properly,
Opportunist politics has dealt with a flowing world and succeeded.
The low proportion of opportunist failure as compared to theoretic
304

FREEDOM DE FACTO
failure gives us our measure for the value of the single element i.e.,
movement or flow in the functioning of society.
The proportion of opportunist failure gives us our measure for the
value of the lump of all the other elements put together, and these
elements have been fairly well in the grasp of the theoreticians.
What we have needed is not less theory but more theory. Machia-
velli’s democracy was theoretic, even his idea of movement is a circle
and did not attain any conception whatever of the flow, his point
was revolving in a fixed orbit. Herbert of Cherbury corrected him by
indicating the opportunist (the strictly opportunist) value of having
a just cause. You can take it that Cherbury’s justifying justice on an
opportunist basis is indicative of his time—spirit.
Liberty is not defendable on a static theory. Certain measures of
liberty are de facto possessed first by the ‘small number of people’,
secondly by the official aristocracy, who assume habitual exemptions
and do not discuss anything, thirdly by bohemia and the intelli-
gentsia who feel little or no responsibility but who discuss everything.
Fourthly in a clumsier manner by those who have easy money.
Outside these groups the word probably indicates nothing more
than a week-end holiday. The populace does not greatly care for
liberty and no people will make any effort to maintain any group of
rights that has been handed to it on a platter i.e. they defend only
recent acquisitions of liberty.
One has only to consider the enormous and hardly conscious
sacrifices of long held immunities made during and since the war, the
depredations of bureaucracies, passport idiocies etc. When constitu-
tions are not violated by legislature they are quietly subverted by
departmental orders and the only defence against such pervasive
tyranny lies in the education and discrimination of the individual.
To be free he must know his law, that is his own law, the law of his
country or countries, he must know his history, the supposed prin-
ciples underlying it and he must fight every encroachment with every
legal and ethical means his knowledge provides.

A Visiting Card’
FASCIO
A thousand candles together blaze with intense brightness. No
LIBERTY A DUTY
one candle’s light damages another’s. So is the liberty of the
individual in the ideal and fascist state.
THE STATE
In August, 1942, the following elucidatory statement was heard on the
Berlin radio: the power of the state, whether it be Nazi, Fascist, or
Democratic, is always the same, that is-absolute; the different forms of
administration are merely a matter of the different activities which one
agrees not to allow.
The revolution, or the revolutions of the nineteenth century,
defined the idea of liberty as the right to do anything that does not
injure others. But with the decadence of the democratic-or republi-
can—state this definition has been betrayed in the interests of usurers
and speculators.
In the beginning was the word, and the word has been betrayed.
The introduction to any ordered discourse is composed of conscious
or unconscious quotations. For 2,500 years Europe has been quoting
Aristotle, wittingly or unwittingly. In China every dynasty that lasted
as long as three centuries was based on the Ta Hsieh or ‘Great Learn-
ing’? of Confucius and had a group of Confucians behind it, The
Master Kung collected the Odes and the historical documents of the
ancient kings, which he considered instruments worthy of preserva-
tion.
We find two forces in history; one that divides, shatters, and kills,
and one that contemplates the unity of the mystery.
‘The arrow hath not two points.’
There is the force that falsifies, the force that destroys every clearly
delineated symbol, dragging man into a maze of abstract arguments,
destroying not one but every religion.
+ Written in Italian and first pub- Peter Russell, 1952.
lished in Rome, 1942. Translation by * ‘Studio Integrale” in the text. Tr.
John Drummond, first published by
306

A VISITING CARD
But the images of the gods, or Byzantine mosaics, move the soul to
contemplation and preserve the tradition of the undivided light.
BROOKS ADAMS
This member of the Adams family, son of C. F. Adams, grandson of
]. Q. Adams, and great-grandson of J. Adams, Father of the Nation,
was, as far as I know, the first to formulate the idea of Kulturmorphologie
in America. His cyclic vision of the West shows us a consecutive
struggle against four great rackets, namely the exploitation of the fear
of the unknown (black magic, etc.), the exploitation of violence, the
exploitation or the monopolisation of cultivable land, and the exploi-
tation of money.
But not even Adams himself seems to have realised that he fell for
the nineteenth-century metaphysic with regard to this last. He dis-
tinguishes between the pride of the usurers and that of the mono-
polists, but he slides into the concept, shared by Mill and Marx, of
money as an accumulator of energy.
Mill defined capital ‘as the accumulated stock of human labour’?
And Marx, or his Italian translator (U.T.-E.T, edition): ‘com-
modities, in so far as they are values, are materialised labour,"*
so denying both God and nature.
With the falsification of the word everything else is betrayed.
Commodities (considered as values, surplus values, food, clothes, or
whatever) are manufactured raw materials.
Only spoken poetry and unwritten music are composed without
any material basis, nor do they become ‘materialised’.
The usurers, in their obscene and pitch-dark century, created this
satanic transubstantiation, their Black Mass of money, and in so doing
deceived Brooks Adams himself, who was fighting for the peasant and
humanity against the monopolists.
*,.. money alone is capable of being transmuted immediately into
any form of activity."*-This is the idiom of the black myth!
One sees well enough what he was trying to say, as one understands
what Mill and Marx were trying to say, But the betrayal of the word
begins with the use of words that do not fit the truth, that do not say
what the author wants them to say.
Money does not contain energy. The half-lira piece cannot create the
1 Quoted by Brooks Adams, The in the original: *... alle Waaren als
Law of Civilization and Decay, new edition, Werthe vergegenstandlichte men-
Knopf, New York, 1943, p. 297. Tr, schliche Arbeit’ (Das Kapital, III, i). Tr.
2In the text: ‘le merci, in quanto + Brooks Adams, loc. cit. Tr,
son valori, sono lavoro materializzato’ ;
307

CIVILISATION, MONEY AND HISTORY
platform ticket, the cigarettes, or piece of chocolate that issues from
the slot—machine.
But it is by this piece of legerdemain that humanity has been
thoroughly trussed up, and it has not yet got free.
Without history one is lost in the dark, and the essential data of
modern history cannot enlighten us unless they are traced back at
least to the foundation of the Sienese bank, the Monte dei Paschi; in
other words, to the perception of the true basis of credit, viz., ‘the
abundance of nature and the responsibility of the whole people’.
MONEY
The difference between money and credit is one of time. Credit is the
future tense of money. Without the definition of words knowledge
cannot be transmitted from one man to another.
One can base one's discourse on definitions, or on the recounting
of historical events (the philosophical method, or the literary or
historical method, respectively).
Without a narrative prelude, perhaps, no one would have the
patience to consider so-called ‘dry’ definitions,
The war in which brave men are being killed and wounded our own
war here and now, began-or rather the phase we are now fighting
began—in 1694, with the foundation of the Bank of England.
Said Paterson in his manifesto addressed to prospective shareholders,
‘the bank hath benefit of the interest on all moneys which it creates
out of nothing’.
This swindle, calculated to yield interest at the usurious rate of sixty
per cent was impartial. It hit friends and enemies alike,
In the past, the quantity of money in circulation was regulated, as
Lord Overstone (Samuel Loyd) has said, ‘to meet the real wants of
commerce, and to discount all commercial bills arising out of legiti-
mate transactions’*
But after Waterloo Brooks Adams saw that ‘nature herself was
favouring the usurers’.?
For more than a century after Waterloo, no force stood up to the
setae of money.‘ The relevant passage from Brooks Adams is as
ollows:
1 Quoted by Christopher Hollis, 3 Ibid,, p. 306. Tr,
The Two Nations, Chapter Ill, See also * thid., pp. 310, 326-7, and Chapter
Pound's Canto XLVL Tr. XI generally. Tr.
* Quoted by Brooks Adams, op. cit.,
pp. 307-8. Tr.
308

A VISITING CARD
Perhaps no financier has ever lived abler than Samuel Loyd.
Certainly he understood as few men, even of later generations, have
understood, the mighty engine of the single standard. He compre-
hended that, with expanding trade, an inelastic currency must rise
in value; he saw that, with sufficient resources at command, his class
might be able to establish such a rise, almost at pleasure; certainly
that they could manipulate it when it came, by taking advantage of
foreign exchange. He perceived moreover that, once established,
a contraction of the currency might be forced to an extreme, and
that when money rose beyond price, as in 1825, debtors would have
to surrender their property on such terms as creditors might
dictate
I'm sorry if this passage should seem obscure to the average man of
letters, but one cannot understand history in twenty minutes. Our
culture lies shattered in fragments, and with the monetology of
usurocracy our economic culture has become a closed book to the
aesthetes.
Your revolution is our revolution; and ours was, and is, yours:
against a common, putrescent enemy. The peasant feeds us and the
gombeen-man strangles us—if he cannot suck our blood by degrees.
The dates of American history are as follows:
1694-6-Foundation of the stinking Bank, a private company, styled
‘of England’.
1750-Sanctions against Pennsylvania, forbidding the colony to issue
its own paper money.
(A number of different, secondary events are mentioned in the
obscurantist text-books administered to the victims in the schools
and universities of the U.S.A.)
1776—Beginning of the American Revolution.
Various frauds and betrayals follow on the part of Hamilton, of
speculating Congressmen, and of those who hoarded up depreciated
veterans’ certificates, their face value being restored after their pur-
chase by Congressmen, etc,
1791 and 1816-Foundation of the first and second Banks ‘of the
United States’.
1830-40-The war of the people against the Bank, won by the people
under the leadership of Jackson and Van Buren.
The most interesting decade in American history: a decade that has
practically disappeared from the school-books.
1861-5-The Civil War, between debtors and creditors, on the moral
pretext that the debtors possessed negro slaves.
Right in the middle of this war the Government was betrayed and
3 hi, p. 315, Tr.
309

CIVILISATION, MONEY AND HISTORY
the people were sold into the hands of the Rothschilds, through the
intermediaries John Sherman, Ikleheimer, and Van der Gould.
1865-Assassination of Lincoln, followed by eighty years of deca-
dence.
But one can understand nothing of American history unless one
understands the great betrayal.
OVERHOLSER
A small country lawyer, ‘not trained in research’, which means he
was not in the pay of usurocratic capital and the monopolists, not
dominated by the trusted functionaries of some “university'-Over-
holser gives us, in his History of Money in the United States, the essential
documents,
The great debt that (our friends the) capitalists (of Europe) will
see to it is made out of the war must be used to control the volume
of money... . It will not do to allow the greenback, as it is called,
to circulate ... for we cannot control them. (‘Hazard Circular’,
1862).
Lincoln, assassinated soon after, had said ‘. .. and gave the people
of this Republic the greatest blessing they ever had—their own paper
to pay their own debts.’
Without understanding these facts, and their bearing on each other,
one cannot understand history.
History is written with a knowledge of the despatches of the ambas-
sador Barbon Morosini (particularly one dated from Paris, 28 January
1723 (Venetian style), describing the Law affair), together with a know-
ledge of the documents leading up to the foundation of the Monte dei
Paschi, and the scandalous pages of Antonio Lobero, archivist of the
Banco di San Giorgio of Genoa,
We are still in the same darkness which John Adams, Father of the
Nation, described as ‘downright ignorance of the nature of coin,
credit, and circulation’.*
MONEY
Money is a title, quantitatively determined, exchangeable at will
against any kind of commodities offered on the market. In this respect
1 Quoted by Willis A, Overholser, 1864, about the origin of the green-
op. cit, Chapter IV. See also H, Jerry back, see Writings of Alvaham Lincoln,
Voorhis, Extension of Remarks in the Constitutional Edition, Vol. VII,
House of Representatives, 6 June 1938, p- 270. Tr.
Congressional Record, Appendix, Vol. 83, 2 Quoted by H, Jerry Voorhis, bec.
Part 11, p. 2363. Tr, cit. Tr.
*Froma letter to Colonel E. Taylor,
310

A VISITING CARD
it differs from a railway ticket, which is a specific title without any
general application. —
It is not enough to say of the new money that it is a ‘symbol of
work’,
It is a symbol of collaboration, It is a certificate of work done within
a system, estimated, or ‘consecrated’, by the state.
State or imperial money has always been an assertion of sovereignty.
Sovereignty carries with it the right to coin or print money.
‘Within a system’ means that the money must be a certificate of work
done useful to the nation, the value to the nation of the work in
question being estimated by the state,
Misunderstandings about money have been, and continue to be,
intentional, They derive neither from the nature of money nor from
any natural stupidity of the public.
It was a Rothschild who wrote: ‘Those few who can understand the
(ursurocratic) system will be ... busy getting profits, .., while the
general public ... will probably never suspect that the system is
absolutely against their interests,’ (From a letter of Rothschild Bros.,
quoting John Sherman, addressed to the firm of Ikleheimer, Morton
and Van der Gould, dated 25 June 1863.)
The cultural tradition with regard to money, which should never
have become separated from the main stream of literary culture,
may be traced from Demosthenes to Dante; from Salmasius to
M. Butchart’s Money (an anthology of opinions of three centuries);
from the indignation of Antoninus Pius, that people should attempt
to exploit other people’s misfortunes (e.g., shipwrecks), to
… il duol che sopra Senna
induce, falseggiando la moneta. (Par. XIX, 118-19).
After the statements of the Ministers Riccardi and Funk it would
probably be pointless to recapitulate the whole controversy, now
passed into history, over the campaign for ‘work-money’, and in any
case one could not cover it adequately in a ‘Visiting Card’.
Credit is a social product, It does not depend on the individual
alone. The confidence you have that I will pay you 100 lire in ten years’
time depends on the social order, the degree of civilisation, the prob-
abilities and possibilities of the human congeries.
To say that the state cannot take action or create something be-
cause it ‘lacks the money’ is as ridiculous as saying that it ‘can't build
roads because it’s got no kilometres.’
Statements that were thought crazy seven or twenty years ago seem
quite clear to the reader of today; they are no longer considered the
mischievous tales of some crack-brained traveller or pilgrim.
311

CIVILISATION, MONEY AND HISTORY
It is nature, the actual existence of goods, or the possibility of pro-
ducing them, that really determines the capacity of the state. Yet it
resides above all in the will and the physical force of the people. And
the will becomes concentrated in the few.
Said Machiavelli, ‘gli uomini vivono in pochi’.
It is within my power to think when I want to think, I will not go
into the mystery of the transformation, or transit, from thought to
the mobilisation of other people's activities.
As a Cavourian I long neglected the writings of Mazzini. The econo-
mists of the last thirty years did not read Mazzini. Their propaganda
has not, therefore, been based on the following passage from the last
chapter of the Duties of Man.
The establishment of public storehouses or depots from which,
the approximate value of the commodities deposited having been
ascertained, the Associations would issue a document or bond, simi-
jar to a banknote, capable of circulating and being discounted, so
that the Association would be able to continue its work without
being thwarted by the need of quick sales, ete.
He speaks, moreover, of a ‘fund for the distribution of credit’, thus
anticipating the theories of the Scotsman, C. H. Douglas, inventor of
Social Credit, 2 monetary system already tried out in Alberta, but
hamstrung by the English.
“The distribution of this credit’, Mazzini continues, ‘should not be
undertaken by the Government, nor by a National Central Bank; but,
with a vigilant eye on the National Power, by local Banks administered by
elective Local Councils.’
And at this point he enters into questions of administration which
do not concern me.
What counts is the direction of the will,
The nineteenth century: the century of usury! Mazzini wrote,
*... the history of the last half-century, and the name of this half-
century is Materialism,’
The name of the Fascist era is Voluntas.
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL
Tam not going back to Mazzini, and I am not going back to Social
Credit. The latter was the doorway through which I came to economic
curiosity, and for this reason, among others, your ‘Continuous Revo-
lution’ interests me perhaps more than it does you. Having seen and
experienced so-called reforms and revolutions which have not, in
fact, taken place, the mystery of the Fascist and Nazi Revolutions
interests me for reasons that would never occur to you, for you have
312

A VISITING CARD
lived through these revolutions instinctively and have experienced
their results without worrying about the mystery.
T insist on the identity of our American Revolution of 1776 with
your Fascist Revolution. Two chapters in the same war against the
usurers, the same who crushed Napoleon,
Let them erect a commemorative urinal to Mond, whose brother
said in the year of Sanctions:
“Napoleon wath a goodth man, it took uth
20 yearth to crwuth him ;
it will not take uth 20 years to crwuth Mussolini’
adding as an afterthought
‘and the economic war has begun,"*
I know that drawing-room; that sofa where sat the brother of
Imperial Chemicals, 1 know it. It is not something I read in some
newspaper or other; I know it by direct account. Fortunately these
messes have no sense of proportion, or the world would already be
entirely under their racial domination.
C'EST TOUJOURS LE BEAU MONDE QUI GOUVERNE
Or the best society, meaning the society that, among other things,
reads the best books, possesses a certain ration of good manners and,
especially, of sincerity and frankness, modulated by silence.
The Counsellor Tchou said to me ‘These peoples (the Chinese and
Japanese) should be like brothers. They read the same books.’
Le beau monde governs because it has the most rapid means of com-
munication. It does not need to read blocks of three columns of
printed matter. It communicates by the detached phrase, variable in
length, but timely.
Said the Comte de Vergennes, ‘Mr. Adams, the newspapers govern
the world.”*
And Adams in his old age:
Every bank of discount is downright corruption
taxing the public for private individuals’ gain,
and if I say this in my will
the American people wal pronounce I died crazy.*
1 See Canto LXXVIIL (The Cantos, ® From a letter to Benjamin Rush,
p. 508, or p. 477, U.S, edition). Tr. 28 August 1811, see Works, Vol. 1X,
* Recounted in a letter to Samuel p. 638. The Italian text, however,
Perley, 19 June 1809, see the Works of follows the author's own paraphrase
Jotn Adams (Boston, 1850-6}, Vol. IX, in Canto LXXI, which ts therefore
p. 622, and the author's Canto LXXI. used here. Tr.
Tr.
313

CIVILISATION, MONEY AND HISTORY
The democratic system was betrayed. According to Adams, Jefferson,
Madison, and Washington, it rested on two main principles of ad-
ministration, local κα, organic. The basis was roughly geographical,
butit also represented different ways of life, different interests, agrarian,
fisheries, etc. The delegates of the thirteen colonies formed, more or
less, a chamber of corporations.
And the nation controlled the nation's money-in theory at least
until 1863, and occasionally even in fact. This essential basis of the
republican system of the U.S.A. is today a dead letter, though it can
still be seen printed in the text of the U.S. Constitution:
‘The Congress shall have Power ... To coin Money (and) regulate
the Value thercot.‘
WORGL
At about the beginning of the second decade of the Fascist Era, the
small Tyrolean town of Worgl sent shivers down the backs of all the
lice of Europe, Rothschildian and others, by issuing its own Gesellist
money (or rather the Gesellist variety of Mazzinian money), Each
month every note of this money had to have a revenue stamp affixed
to it of a value equal to one per cent of the face-value of the note. Thus
the municipality derived an income of twelve per cent per annum on
the new money put into circulation.
The town had been bankrupt: the citizens had not been able to pay
their rates, the municipality had not been able to pay the school-
teachers, etc, But in less than two years everything had been put right,
and the townspeople had built a new stone bridge for themselves etc.
All went well until an ill-starred Wérgl note was presented at the
counter of an Innsbruck bank. It was noticed, all right-no doubt
about that! The judaic-plutocratic monopoly had been infringed.
Threats, fulminations, anathema! The burgomaster was deprived of
his office, but the ideological war had been won.
Senator Bankhead proposed an emission of dollar-bills up to a limit
of a milliard dollars (Bankhead-Pettengill Bill, 17 February 1933), but
the stamps were to be affixed at the insane rate of two cents per week,
equal to an interest of 104 per cent per annum, Incomprehension of
the principle of the just price could not have been carried to absurder
lengths. And the Social Creditors in Alberta committed equally gross
stupidities; the prescribed stamp was impractiably small and provided
with a very unadhesive gum.
A PRINCIPLE
The state can lend, The fleet that was victorious at Salamis was built
with money advanced to the shipbuilders by the State of Athens.
314

A VISITING CARD
The abuse of this state prerogative was demonstrated during the
decadence of the Roman Empire, The state loaned money to unworthy
borrowers who did not repay it. With stamp scrip the reimbursement
is automatic. Anyone who does not want to pay up watches his pur-
chasing-power being gradually annulled.
The Colony of Pennsylvania lent its colonial paper money to the
farmers, to be repaid in annual instalments of ten per cent, and the
prosperity that resulted was renowned throughout the western world.
Equally renowned was the system of the Jesuits in Paraguay.
STAMP SCRIP
Gesell aimed at an increased velocity of circulation, and argued that
money should not enjoy privileges not vouchsafed to commodities.
A form of money that is subject to tax if it has not been spent within
the month does not stagnate. This is how the mercantilist sees it.
From the point of view of the government, the administration, or
the state, on the other hand, stamp scrip offers a means not only of
taxing the public but of dispensing with other taxes up to the total
value of the stamps to be affixed.
The advantages of this form of taxation are that it costs little to col-
lect and that the accounting is practically automatic. One knows that
for every million spent by the state there will be an income of 120,000
per annum. And this tax will never fall on anyone who does not have
in his pocket, at the very moment it falls due, one hundred times the sum
demanded.
CANCELLATION
Among all the so-called mysteries of economics none is so little under-
stood as that of the cancellation of superfluous money or credit,
Under the Gesellist system this becomes so simple as to be practically
understandable by a child.
Every given sum of money emitted cancels itself in 100 months
(cight years and four months), and therefore acts, to a certain extent,
as a safeguard against inflation.
Note that inflation occurs when commodities get consumed
quicker than money, or when there is too much money about. It
seems to me stupid that in order to furnish the state its purchasing-
power, money should be collected as it is by the regular taxation
system, in accordance with the superstitions of the mercantilist and
usurocratic epochs. As ridiculous as it would be for someone who
possessed a tin mine to go about collecting old tin cans.
The moral effect of certain regulations, and of institutions such as
the ammassi (grain pools), should not be underestimated, but a point
315

CIVILISATION, MONEY AND HISTORY
comes when it might be more convenient to control the harvesting
by means of taxable government drafts, which instead of creating an
additional burden of interest-bearing debt would function as a source
of income to the state.
To sum up: The Gesellist systems means an advantage of 17 per cent
per annum to the state compared with the system of government
loans. For loans cost the government approximately 5 per cent per
annum, which has to be collected from the public in the form of
additional taxation. Stamp scrip, on the other hand, if issued by the
state for any kind of service useful to the state, would lessen pre-existing
taxation to an amount equal to 12 per cent of the quantity of Gesellist
money spent by the state.
SAVING
We need a medium for saving and a medium for buying and selling,
but there is no eternal law that forces us to use the same medium for
these two different functions.
Stamp scrip might be adopted as an auxiliary currency, and not as
the sole form of money.
The proportion of normal money to stamp scrip, if judiciously and
accurately estimated, could be used to maintain a just and almost
unvarying ratio between the amount of available and wanted com-
modities and the total quantity of the nation’s money, or at least to
bring its fluctuations within tolerable limits.
Bacon wrote: ‘money is like muck, no good except it be spread.’
Jackson: ‘The safest place for deposits is in the pants of the people.’
Age-old economic wisdom does not hide itself behind university
faculties. And we have proof of it now in the recent war-time cam-
paignstogive up your ‘gold for the Country’, your ‘wool for the troops’.
The Roman Empire was ruined by the dumping of cheap grain from
Egypt, which sold at an unjustly low price. And usury corrodes,
From the day when the T’ang Emperors began to issue their state notes,
(in about .p, 656 it is thought) the use of gold in the manufacture of
money was no longer necessary and became a matter of ignorance or
a means of usury. These notes kept their original form from the year
656 down to 841-7, and the inscription is substantially the same as that
to be seen on an Italian ten-lire note.
All these facts fit into the system. We may write or read explanations,
316

A VISITING CARD
or we may reflect and understand by ourselves, without wasting
optical energy deciphering printed pages.
THE ICONOCLASTS
The power of putrefaction aims at the obfuscation of history; it seeks
to destroy not one but every religion, by destroying the symbols, by
leading off into theoretical argument. Theological disputes take the
place of contemplation. Disputation destroys faith, and interest in
theology eventually goes out of fashion: not even the theologians
themselves take any more interest in it,
The power of putrefaction would destroy all intrinsic beauty.
Whether this power is borne by certain carriers, or by certain others,
remains to be determined. It is spread like the bacilli of typhus or
bubonic plague, carried by rats wholly unconscious of their role.
Suspect anyone who destroys an image, or wants to suppress a page
of history.
Latin is sacred, grain is sacred, Who destroyed the mystery of fecun-
dity, bringing in the cult of sterility? Who set the Church against the
Empire? Who destroyed the unity of the Catholic Church with this
mud-wallow that serves the Protestants in the place of contemplation?
Who decided to destroy the mysteries within the Church so as to be
able to destroy the Church itself by schism? Who has wiped the con-
sciousness of the greatest mystery out of the mind of Europe—to
arrive at an atheism proclaimed by Bolshevism, in Russia but not of
Russia?
Who has received honours by putting argumentation where before
there had been faith?
COMMUNICATIONS
Who, what is more, attacks, continuously, the nerve centres, the
centres of communication between nation and nation? How is it that
you know only a chance selection of the books by your foreign
contemporaries, but almost never any of their principle or key works?
Who controls and impedes the commerce of perception, of intuition,
between one people and another?
1 demand, and I shall never cease to demand, a greater degree of
communication. It is already too late for you to know eighty per cent
of the English and American books that I could have suggested to you
in 1927, for translation or for reading in the original.
Joyce is familiar to you, but not Wyndham Lewis or E. E. Cummings.
You were introduced to Eliot without too serious a time-lag, but you
317

CIVILISATION, MONEY AND HISTORY
do not know Ford Madox Ford, nor W. H. Hudson. The copying of
the France of 1920 continues, but you do not know Crevel. And so on,
The crap has been delivered in abundance-in superabundance, The
form of critical activity known as ‘saggistica’ is like that of the street-
sweeper: a lump of dung from every horse, to be analysed by chemists
or ‘specialists’.
Nicholas V, on the other hand, considered every book translated
from the Greek as a conquest. The better the book, then, the greater
the conquest?
The conquest of a Wodehouse is not as great as that of a Hardy or,
say, of Trollope’s The Warden, To conquer a chance work by a good
writer means less than to conquer a masterpiece by the same author
or by another equally great.
The enemy has been at work during these very twenty years of
Fascism that you have lost to him through procrastination. Twenty
years at five per cent in which he has doubled his capital while he goes
on drawing interest. This sum that he pockets is your loss,
THE CRITIC
The worth of the critic is known not by his arguments but by the
quality of his choice. Confucius has given us the best anthology in the
world, which has already lasted 2,400 years. He collected the docu-
ments of a history already ancient in his own time, as were the Songs of
the Kingdoms.
Criticism may be written by a string of names: Confucius, Ovid, and
Homer. Villon, Corbiere, Gautier.
One does not discuss painting with a man who is ignorant of
Leonardo, Velasquez, Manet, or Pier della Francesca, In my efforts to
establish the distinction between the first and second degree of poetic
intensity, it’s no good my arguing; one cannot condense a score of
volumes into a pamphlet, I have edited several anthologies. I do not
believe they have yet been digested here in Italy. Even my small
anthology of nineteenth-century French poets contains observations
that I cannot state more concisely. But with a score of books I could
give you a basis for fruitful discussion—at least I believe so.
Tincluded one or two poems by E. E. Cummings in the anthology
= published in 1932 by G. Scheiwiller at Milan, Eliot you already
now.
1 have translated Moscardino by Pea: the only time in my life that I
have ever wanted to translate a novel. And now, at last, in the Year
XXI of the Fascist Era, it seems to me that the Fascist style may be
beginning to take root. Controversy is valuable only insofar as it
See action, and the Book of Mencius is the most modern book in
the world.
318

A VISITING CARD
15 September, Anno XX, at Rapallo.
Peanuts could bring self-sufficiency in food to Italy or, rather to the
empire, for these ‘monkey nuts’ would grow better in Cyrenaica.
The pedlar brings you plenty of stuff in his pack, News is what one hasn't
heardA
Wealth comes from exchange, but judgment comes from compari-
son.
We think because we do not know.
THE HISTORY OF LITERATURE
Yeats said; ‘They don’t like poetry; they like something else, but they
like to think they like poetry.’
There are at least three kinds of people who practise the art of writing:
the instinctives, almost unconsciously; the inventors; and the ex-
ploiters. They ought to be organised in separate divisions of the
Fascist Syndicate, or given separate Syndicates in the Corporation.
When the group succeeds in organising itself into a component of a
corporation, then we shall have arrived at the state of Utopia.
Philologists, writers of theses, etc., frequently mistake the clamour of
exploitation for inventive work. Eliot would recognise, I imagine, a
greaterinfluence of Lanmanand Woods, his professors of Sanskrit, than
the superficial influence of the French poets. And I consider the hours
spent with Layamon’s Brut, or copying a prose translation of Catullus
by W. MacDaniel; Ibbotson's instruction in Anglo-Saxon, or W. P.
Shepard's on Dante and the troubadours of Provence~more impor-
tant than any contemporary influences. One who really understood
the question of clear expression was Ford Madox Ford.
Literary criticism gets bogged-up in useless arguments if the following
categories are not accepted:
(1) what is read by the young serious writer for the purpose of
learning his profession, i.c., to learn to know a masterpiece and to
form his own critical standards;
(2) what is read as a narcotic, easy reading for the lazy, for the
illiterate and dilettante public;
(3) what may be usefully introduced from one country into another
in order to nourish the intellectual life of the latter,
The first and third of these categories may overlap, but they do not
necessarily have the same boundaries,
4 Also in English in the text. Tr.
319

CIVILISATION, MONEY AND HISTORY
PAIDEUMA
A culture is an organism made up of:
(1) a direction of the will;
(2) certain ethical bases, or a general agreement on the relative
importance of the various moral, intellectual, and material values;
(3) details understood by specialists and members of the same
profession,
To replace the marble goddess on her pedestal at Terracina is worth
more than any metaphysical argument.
And the mosaics in Santa Maria in Trastevere recall a wisdom lost by
scholasticism, an understanding denied to Aquinas, A great many
images were destroyed for what they had in them.
Ma dicon, ch’é idolatra, i Fra’ Minori,
per invidia, che non é lor vicina.!
In his After Strange Gods Eliot loses all the threads of Arachne®, and a
new edition of Gabriele Rossetti’s Mistero dell‘Amor Platonico (1840)
would be useful.
Eliot, in this book, has not come through uncontaminated by the
Jewish poison,
Until a man purges himself of this poison he will never achieve
understanding. It is a poison that lost no time in seeping into European
thought, Already by the time of Scotus Erigena it had begun to make a
bog of things. Grosseteste thinks straight when his thought derives
= European sources, And the best poets before Dante were Ghibel-
ine.
To want to settle ethical relationships, Le., to settle the ethical
problem without confusing it with the metaphysical, is quite a differ-
ent matter. In these essays Eliot falls into too many non sequiturs. Until
he succeeds in detaching the Jewish from the European elements of his
peculiar variety of Christianity he will never find the right formula.
Not a jot or tittle of the hebraic alphabet can pass into the text without
danger of contaminating it.
Cabbala, black magic, and the whole caboodle, Church against
Empire, Protestantism against the unity of the Mother Church,
always destroying the true religion, destroying its mnemonic and
commemorative symbols.
1A popular image of the Madonna For envy, as it's not in their
then in Orsanmichele renowned asa back yard."
miracle worker (Cavalcanti, Sonnet XXXV). Tr.
“But the Friars Minor say that it’s * See footnote on page 77. Ed.
idolatry,
320

A VISITING CARD
OF WANDERERS
It is amusing, after so many years, to find that my disagreement with
Eliot is a religious disagreement, each of us accusing the other of
Protestantism. Theophile Gautier and Swinburne are members of my
church. But what Eliot says about Confucius is nonsense, or nearly so.
He has renounced America ever since the time of his first departure,
but if he would consider the dynasty of the Adamses he would see that
it was precisely because it lacked the Confucian law that this family
lost the Celestial Decree.
In five generations we have had a president, another president, an
ambassador, and two writers; and now one or two almost anonymous
officials, absolutely outside public life—with the nation in the hands of
the enemy.
STYLE
In one’s youth one discusses style-or one should. The poetical reform
between 1910 and 1920 coincided with the scrutiny of the word, the
cleaning-up of syntax. This should be tackled in addition to, almost
apart from, the question of content: one should seek to define the
image, to discover the truth, or a part of the truth, even before one
has learned that it may not be the whole truth.
For those without access to my criticism in English, I repeat: the art
of poetry is divisible into phanopwia, melopeia, and Iogopwia. Verbal com-
position, that is to say, is formed of words which evoke or define visual
phenomena, of words which register or suggest auditory phenomena
(Le., which register the various conventional sounds of the alphabet
and produce, or suggest, a raising or lowering of the tone which can
sometimes be registered more accurately by musical notation), and,
thirdly, of a play or ‘dance’ among the concomitant meanings, cus-
toms, usages, and implied contexts of the words themselves.
In this last category Eliot surpasses me; in the second I surpass him.
Part of his logopwia is incompatible with my main purpose,
We have collaborated in literary criticism, we have made decisions and
taken measures against certain diseases of writing. The problem of the
word cannot be exhausted in a single lifetime. It consists of at least two
parts:
(1) the word of literary art which presents, defines, suggests the
yisual image: the word which must rise afresh in each work of art and
come down with renewed light;
(2) the legal or scientific word which must, at the outset, be defined
with the greatest possible precision, and never change its meaning.
321

CIVILISATION, MONEY AND HISTORY
As for ethics, I refer the reader to the Studio Integrale of Confucius in my
vilingual edition produced in collaboration with Alberto Luchini.t
Of religion it will be enough for me to say, in the style of a literary
friend, ‘ogni ravennate che si rispetta, viene procreato, o almeno
riceve spirito o alito di vita, nel mausoleo di Galla Placidia" (G.B.V.)-
‘every self-respecting Ravennese is procreated, or at least receives spirit
or breath of life, in the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia’,
Dante perhaps said too much in the Paradiso without saying enough.
in any case the theologians who put reason (logic) in the place of faith
began the slithering process which has ended up with theologians who
take no interest in theology whatsoever.
Tradition inheres (‘inerisce’*) in the images of the gods, and gets lost
in dogmatic definitions. History is recorded in monuments, and that
is why they get destroyed.
SYSTEM
Russia the arsenal of judwocracy from 1919 to the present; the United
States the proposed arsenal of tomorrow, or until another is established
in South America. Once the barbarians are aroused a usurers’ head-
quarters moves on, betraying one nation, one race, after another.
‘It took us twenty years to crush Bonaparte.”
One should distinguish between the fraud of enjoying interest on
money created out of nothing, and the swindle of raising the value of
the monetary unit through the manipulation of some monopoly, so
forcing debtors to pay double in terms of the commodities or property
they got at the time of the loan,
Whence one descends, or returns, to another ancient fraud, that of
forcing a nation to purchase commodities (often useless) for twice as
much as they are worth.
I would say that every book of value contains a bibliography declared
or implied. The De Vulgari Eloquic refers us to Richard of St. Victor,
Sordello, Bertran de Born, and Arnaut Daniel, Dante was my Baedeker
} This edition, published at Rapallo cause another blockhead who died in
in 1942, consists of the Chinese text the seventeenth century lost the
with an Italian translation. The tradition,
author's latest rendering of the Te Inhaerco, imbaeresco! 1F the latter is
Hsïeh in English is The Great Learning wanting in certain forms in Latin, it is
(Stone Classics Text, 1951), Tr. certainly not wanting in the present
7A blockhead of a lexicographer indicative. Abandoning the active
informs me that two Latin verbs have forms of verbs makes the whole lan-
disappeared forcing one to use the guage weak and flabby. Inere, or inhoere,
copula and a participle simply be- might perhaps be a better form.
322

A VISITING CARD
in Provence, Here | may mention II Giusto prezzo nel Medio Aevo by the
Sac. L. P. Cairoli, apart from the other books of Brooks Adams and
Overholser already referred to.
Terminology is not science, but every science advances by defining its
eee with ever greater precision.
With a clear and exact definition of money, a clear understanding of
the nature of money, years of economic bewilderment and stupidity
will be avoided. Add definitions of credit and circulation, and you will
practically arrive at an economic erudition that can be recorded in a
few pages and really understood in a few months of study.
Without understanding economics one cannot understand history.
John Adams was amazed that very few men had studied systems of
government. Between his time and that of Aristotle political literature
is scarce enough. And Salmasius? De Mado Usurarum appears not to have
been reprinted since 1639 or 40.
The emphasis given to economics by Shakespeare, Bacon, Hume,
and Berkeley does not seem to have been enough to have kept it
prominent in the Anglo-Saxon public conscience. After the arch-
heretic Calvin, it seems, discussion of usury has gone out of fashion.
A pity! As long as the Mother Church concerned herself with this
matter one continued to build cathedrals. Religious art flourished.
KULTURMORPHOLOGIE
To repeat: an expert, looking at a painting (by Memmi, Goya, or
any other), should be able to determine the degree of the tolerance of
usury in the society in which it was painted.
Artis a means of communication. It is subject to the will of the artist,
yet goes beyond it.
“The character of the man is revealed in every brush-stroke’ (and this
does not apply only to ideograms).
TEXT-BOOKS
The text-book for anyone who wants to study the art of metric, the
art of making verses, remains the De Vulgari Eloguio, but no one can
become an expert without knowing Bion (‘Death of Adonis’), the
troubadours mentioned by Dante, and the technical development in
France during the nineteenth century, including a score of poets with-
out great importance for the matter they had to communicate (see
Make it New),
323

CIVILISATION, MONEY AND HISTORY
We can already understand Chinese phanepwia up to a point, both in
the original and in good translations, but their art of sound and metric
must remain a closed book to the West until the advent of a really
impassioned sinologue.
To learn what poetry is one cannot dispense with a score of authors
who did not write in the language of Petramala:
“Quoniam permultis ac diversis idiomatibus negotium exercitatur
humanum, … (D.V.E, I, vi).
Unless you know Homer, Sappho, Ovid, Catullus, Propertius, Dante,
Cavalcanti, a few songs of the troubadours together with a few of von
der Vogelweide or Hans Sachs, Villon, and Gautier, you won't know
European poetry, And your understanding will not be complete unless
you take a look at Anglo-Saxon metric.
The appellation ‘anseres naturali’ is not mine (see D.V.E., Il, iv).
No one who is unprepared to train himself in his art by comparative
study of the culture today accessible, in the spirit of the author of the
De Vulgari Eloquio, can expect to be taken seriously, The matter to be
examined is more extensive—that is all.
Confucius was an anthologist-the greatest.
Dante was content to cite the first lines of certain canzoni.
The convenience of printing allows us to make things easier by
giving an entire poem.
In the latter half of the nineteenth century technical and metrical
development was centred in France, After 1917 it was continued in the
English language. It was my intention that there should have been two
classes of Imagists: Hellenists and modernists, Mercantilism inter-
vened, The development continued. Practically no one has succeeded
in producing satisfactory English translations from the Greek: only a
few fragments have come through successfully. Perhaps the most
beautiful books of poetry in the English language are Arthur Golding’s
translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, printed in 1567, and Gavin Doug-
las's Eneados, done half a century earlier, in a Scots dialect that no one
can read today without a glossary. No one has succeeded in translat-
ing Catullus into English, yet technical development has made
progress since Eliot, and E. E. Cummings achieves a Catullian ferocity
in his untranslatable:
DIRGE
flotsam and jetsam
are gentleman poeds
useappeal netsam
our spinsters and coeds)
324

A VISITING CARD
thoroughly bretish
they scout the inhumun
itarian fetish
that man isn’t woman
vive the millenni
um three cheers for labor
give all things to enni
one buggar thy nabor
(neck and senektie
are gentleman ppoyds
even whose recta
are covered by lloyds
In his tour de force L. Zukofsky gives a phonetic representation of an
American chewing chewing-gum. We must distinguish between the
masterpieces of world poetry and a certain few poems which are
necessary to keep us informed of what our contemporaries are doing
elsewhere.
Twenty years ago Guy Charles Cros and Vlaminck wrote a few
verses; ten years ago Basil Bunting wrote some too. Of these, and of
the novel Les Pieds dans Ie Plat by the late René Crevel, it may be said that
ar are better than the foreign crap currently displayed on the book-
stalls.
EN FAMILLE
No one, perhaps, has ever built a larger tract of railway, with nothing
but his own credit and 5,000 dollars cash, than that laid down by my
grandfather. The credit came from the lumbermen (and in face of the
opposition of the big U.S. and foreign steel monopolists) by printing
with his brother the paper money of the Union Lumbering Co. of
Chippewa Falls, bearing the promise to ‘pay the bearer on demand . . .
in merchandize or lumber’,
Tt was only when my father brought some old newspaper clippings
to Rapallo in 1937 that I discovered that T.C.P. had already in 1878 been
writing about, or urging among his fellow Congressmen, the same
essentials of monetary and statal economics that I am writing about
today.
SOCIAL
Credit is a social phenomenon. The credit of the nation belongs to the
nation, and there is not the slightest reason why the nation should
haye to pay rent for its own credit, There is nothing to force it to hire
325

CIVILISATION, MONEY AND HISTORY
credit from private interests. Thus Jefferson wrote to Crawford as long
igo as 1816:
...and if the national bills issued be bottomed (as is indispensable)
on pledges of specific taxes for their redemption within certain and
moderate epochs, and be of proper denominations for circulation,
no interest on them would be necessary or just, because they would
answer to every one of the purposes of the metallic money with-
drawn and replaced by them.
This quotation! forms the second chapter of my Introductory Text-book
(which teaches the economic history of the United States in four
chapters). The first chapter consists of an observation of John Adams
already referred to:
All the perplexities, confusion, and distress in America arise, not
from defects in their Constitution or confederation, not from want
of honor or virtue, so much as from downright ignorance of the
nature of coin, credit, and circulation?
The third chapter is Lincoln’s
. . . and gave the people of this Republic the greatest blessing they
ever had-their own paper to pay their own debts.?
And the last is from the Constitution of the United States, Article I,
Section 8, clause 5:
The Congress shall have Power ...
To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin,
and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;
[signed] George Washington — President
and deputy from Virginia
The ‘Book’ consists of only one page, followed by half a page of
bibliographical data mentioning, in addition to the authors already
cited in this pamphlet, Christopher Hollis, R. McNair Wilson, and
P. J. Larranaga.
Anyone who has mastered these four short chapters will be well
advanced in the understanding of monetary and political economy.
Money is a title and a measure. If it is metallic it is subject to assay to
ensure that the coin is of specified fineness and weight. The use of such
money still falls under the classification of barter. When people begin
to understand the function of money as a title, the desire to barter
disappears. When the state understands its duties and powers it does
! Sec the Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ἃ δες p. 280 above, note 3. Tr.
Memorial Edition, Vol. XV, p. 31, Tr, ® See p. 280 above, note 2. Tr.
326

A VISITING CARD
not leave its sovereignty in the hands of private interests that are
irresponsible or arrogate to themselves unwarranted responsibilities,
It is not right to say that ‘work-money’ is a ‘symbol of work’. More
exactly it is a symbol of a collaboration between nature, the state, and
an industrious population.
The beauty of the designs on ancient coins rightly symbolizes the
dignity of sovereignty inherent in royal or imperial responsibility,
The disappearance of numismatic art coincides with the corruption
of the governments concerned,
The Rothschilds financed the Austrian armies against Venice and
Romagna, Naturally.
The Rothschilds financed the armies against the Roman Republic.
Naturally. They tried to buy over Cavour. Naturally. Cavour accom-
plished the first stage towards Italian unity, allowing himself to be
exploited according to the custom of his times, but he refused to be
dominated by the exploiters.
ROMA
o M
M o
AMOR
Above all this, the substantiality of the soul, and the substantiality
of the gods.
DICHTEN=CONDENSARE
The German word Dichtung means ‘poetry’, The verb dichten—condensare.
In our intellectual life-or ‘struggle’, if you prefer it-we need facts
that illuminate like a flash of lightning, and authors who set their
subjects in a steady light.
The writings of Frobenius contain flashes of illumination. From nine-
teenth-century philology, relegating everything to separate compart-
ments, creating specialists capable of writing monographs or articles
for encyclopaedias without the least understanding of their import
or relation to the total problem, Frobenius advanced to Kulturmor-
phologie. He brought the living fact to bear on the study of dead
documents. It began—incipit vita nova sua-with his hearing that certain
railway contractors were in conflict with some local tradition. A king
and agirl had driven into the ground where there was a certain hillock;
they ought not to make a cutting through the sacred place. The
materialist contractors took no notice and went ahead—and unearthed
a bronze car with effigies of Dis and Persephone.
Later he wrote, ‘Where we found these rock drawings there was
always water within six feet of the surface.’
327

CIVILISATION, MONEY AND HISTORY
The oral tradition, surviving rites, and also the practical import of
rchacological findings are all part of his total perception. He saw
othing ridiculous in a child’s wanting to know if the last letter of the
vord Katz stood for the cat's tail, and the first one for its head. But to
he school teacher, who cared little for intelligence or lively curiosity,
he child just seemed stupid,
‘o be worthy of the heroes who penetrated into the harbour of
sibraltar ... but!-but they are not even up to Davis Cup players.
‘o live we need facts, and opportunities for comparison. We want no
oreign dumping, neither of material goods nor of psuedo-literary
roduce, But samples for comparison, certainly, To know the best
nodel, and to improve on it. To know the masterpieces, and then
chieve self-sufficiency. Conquests in the manner of Nicholas V,
A comparison between Confucius and Aristotle would hurt no
ne’s ‘Italianity’. A reform of the universities could be effected, in my
pinion, by the infusion of certain known facts condensable into a
ew pages. Confucius, Mencius, the anthology compiled by Confucius
f poems already ancient in his time. A dozen Chinese poets, and a
eneral idea, at least, of the nature of the ideogram as a means of
erbal and visual expression. This vitalizes.
A proper sense of the maxima of poctry. Homer not to be neglected.
The study of metre will require an odd half-hour or so with Bion, the
roubadours, and French poetry between 1880 and 1910. A certain
nobbery, dating back to the Renaissance, has perhaps unduly boosted
he Greek authors at the expense of Ovid, Propertius, and Catullus,
Do not overburden the student, but do as one would in taking him
o a picture-gallery containing a few paintings by the greatest masters.
Juality, not quantity.
In teaching history: a synthesis not inferior to that of Brooks
\dams and, with reference to the last two centuries, some indication
f the continuity, or identity, of the revolutions of 1776 and today,
iz,, the American and your own.
Together with the chronology already given near the beginning of
his pamplet.
Jur friend T. E. Hulme truly said: ‘All a man ever thought would go
nto a half sheet of notepaper. The rest is application and elaboration.’
Without strong tastes one does not love, nor, therefore, exist.
DE MODO USURARUM
zetting into debt is one way of having a career in politics, The Man-
arin Wu Yung tells us that when he was appointed Governor the
ankers eae him to borrow money from them. He insisted that he
328

A VISITING CARD
would never have been able to repay them out of his salary. That was
a mere detail that didn't worry them in the least,
This anecdote has its bearing on the life of an usher I knew at a
library in Venice, who hanged himself after forty years of faithful
service. The note of hand
… rompe i muri e l‘armi.?
and a policy of unjustly low salaries can favour the usurers’ game.
The emphasis is on the adverb ‘unjustly’. Such a policy derives from
an imperfect understanding of the nature of money, and of the power
of the state. The state monetary authorities can supply the needs of
the people and provide for all work useful to the state, up to a limit
imposed by the availabilities of raw materials and the people’s brain-
power and muscle-power, without having to ask permission of the
Rothschilds or to have recourse to the Cavourian alternative.
MONEY A WARNING
It is not yet sufficiently understood that every sound economic sys-
tem, every economic procedure, depends on justice. Money is a
measure. It is a warning or notification of the amount the public owes
to the bearer of the coin or note. ‘Not by nature, but by custom,
whence the name NoMISMA.’
The state can lend. There is more justice in the state being paid for
work done or administered by itself than for the work, or some of the
work, done by non-state employees,
In producing these metallic discs, or pieces of paper, which serve as
a means and a measure of exchange, the state is doing work; and it
would be perfectly just that the employees and officials of the state
were remunerated for doing this work rather than that the state
should collect taxes on the products of other people’s work. The
ethical and intellectual work that goes to determining the measure
of the just price deserves its due reward, This is the ethical basis of the
Gesellist idea, though Gesell may not have said so himself.
There is no reason why an inventor should understand all the
implications of his invention. Gesell saw his system from the point of
view of the merchant who wants a rapid, and always more rapid,
exchange of goods. ‘Wealth is exchange.’ Rossoni* saw at once the
advantage it would bring to the state: ‘Then the state will get some-
thing out of it too,” he said.
It would be fair gain, not filthy lucre. The state income is as impor—
tant as the acceleration of trade. It is perfectly just that the state be
‘ ‘breaks through walls and wea- Italian Minister of Agriculture,
pons’ (Inf., XVI, 2). Tr. 1935-9, Tr.
329

CIVILISATION, MONEY AND HISTORY
-munerated for the work it does. It is unjust that money should
njoy privileges denied to goods. It would be better, too, if money
erished at the same rate as goods perish, instead of being of lasting
urability while goods get consumed and food gets eaten.
Monetary theory is worthy of study because it leads us to the
ontemplation of justice.
CIRCUIT
hould the circulation of capital be automatic? We must distinguish
etween capital and purchasing-power, Striving for a clear termino-
ygy one might limit the term capital to the sense of ‘productive
ndertaking’, or the securities of such an undertaking, i.c., securities
hat presuppose a material basis which yields a produce that can be
ivided periodically, paying interest (share interest in monetary form)
rithout creating inflation, which is a superfluity of paper money in
elation to available goods.
Stamp scrip creates an automatic purchasing-power circuit. Each
ew issue of this money cancels itself in 100 months, In other words:
n automatic circuit that returns to the starting-point in eight years
nd four months, It cannot be hoarded. Anyone who thinks to keep
put by in a stocking will find it slowly melting away. Anyone who
eeds it to live by, or who uses it to stimulate and increase the well-
eing of the nation, will profit by it.
This money, as it cancels itself, is a source of income to the treasury.
sovernment loans do not cancel themselves; they become a per-
nanent liability. It seems to me that stamp scrip is the sole means of
ncreasing the state’s monetary income by spending, No one denies
hat the state should derive an advantage from the operation of electric
ower stations, etc., but the usual systems of taxing these new in-
lustries are more than necessarily complicated.
The government loan creates a liability of five per cent, Stamp scrip
reates a source of income. The loan serves to distribute purchasing-
ower among those who subscribe to it. This may be useful to the
tate up to a point-up to an income, let us say, of 50,000 lire per
innum in the case of any person who merits it, We might even say
1p to 100,000 lire, but not ad infinitum
UNIVERSITY
The modern university was founded at Frankfurt by Leo Frobenius,
ır at least it was the first approach to the modern university, If | had
' This range would have been $2,500—$5,000 at the time of writing.
‘oughly equivalent to £500-£1,000 or Tr.
330

A VISITING CARD
been thirty-five years younger I would have wanted to enrol myself
asa student. If wish to know, for example, if}. S. Millis right in saying
that certain African tribes have a money of account-a money which,
according to him, was a concept of value, having a name that meant
nothing other than this indication of the value of a means of ex-
change~I write to Frankfurt. In this particular case I received, within
ten days, a list of all the tribes that used, or had used, the ‘makute’.
It had become an abstract measure, though it had originally meant
one of the mats or circles of plaited straw that the natives carry slung
behind them as a protection against damp, thorns, etc., when they
sit down,
It was an article of commerce that served to calculate the prices of
other goods, such as salt, or knives - until the Portuguese began to coin
metal ‘makutes’, and to counterfeit them.
When I wanted to know how the primitive telegraph, tapped out
on wooden drums, worked, wrote to Frankfurt. I believe that Frobenius
has marked the transition from the stage of ‘comparative philology’
to that of ‘Kulturmorphologie’, but in any case one cannot fully
understand modern thought without some awareness of Frobenius's
work. Gli uomini vivono in pochi. The books that change our understanding
are few, Several Germans tell me that they make no distinction be-
tween ‘der Kundiger’ and ‘der Kenner’.
The foreigner is liable to acquire some queer ideas about other
people’s languages, but I’m not sure that he's always wrong. At any
event you have no translation of Erlebte Erdteile, and I would say that
you could do with ten or fifteen volumes of Leo Frobenius. l‘m not
going to condense so rich a work, nor to explain more of it than I
know.
The syndicate of scholars is still waiting to be organised on fascist and
corporative lines, The communications systems is slow and imperfect.
I want a printer who, at least once a month, will print what Lwant him
to print, pro bono publico and not for immediate gain.
As long as all the really interesting books are in the hands of only a
hundred—even a dozen—individuals, how is one to find keen and
competent translators? A young friend wanted to read Galdos, but we
couldn’t find any editions. Eventually I had to send to London, but
Treceived only secondary works, not the principal masterpieces.
Two years ago or more, I drew attention to the enterprise of the
Barcelona publishers Yunque, who brought out a series of bilingual
texts,
The amount of matter to be introduced from abroad is quantita-
tively small. It is the quality that counts in this commerce, not the
bulk. We need to import every year say twenty, perhaps even fifty,
books that are not crap and filth. Moral filth is perhaps less poisonous
331

CIVILISATION, MONEY AND HISTORY
han intellectual filth, when it comes to considering the printed page.
Aoral filth, in print, poisons the reader; intellectual filth can be toxic
» a whole race, The means a nation chooses (or lets be chosen) for
he distribution of books and printed matter are of importance. For
he last hundred years few have worried about them. Flaubert pub-
shed his sottisier. But half a century later the study of what was
ctually printed and offered for sale on the bookstalls was considered
ccentric on the part of the present writer. | made an analysis in
ighteen numbers of the New Age, but no publisher has wanted to
eprint the series, which was, in any case, cut short by the protests of
he readers of the said journal, Yet a whole system is collapsing, and
ır want of having paid attention to the symptoms of its own defile-
rent.
The pathology of the printed page is pathology. The pathology of
rt is pathology. Getting some idiotic idea believed is preparing for the
rackup. Yeats knew a ‘founder of a religion’ who managed to get a
-ore of victims to believe that the world was a hollow sphere and that
e lived inside it.
We must get rid of the stooges and straw men. We must distinguish
etween the intellectual construction of Europe, and poison. Perhaps
1 re-reading the Divina Commedia we may find this dissociation of ideas.
cannot say. Geryon is biform. He takes you lower down. And after
ne eighth canto of the Paradiso, who understands the meaning?
It seems that only a few persons occupied about the temples, at
ast at Rome, were enough to keep alive the cult of the old gods.
he preservation of verities, the process of history, the rise and fall of
dogma, whether or not affected by contingent events, is a great deal
vore interesting than is commonly supposed.
Italy has lived more fully than other nations because she has kept
p the habit of placing statues in gardens. The grove calls for the
olumn. Nemus aram vult.
GOOD GOVERNMENT
believe that the most useful service that I could do for Italy would be
) put before you, every year, a few lines of Confucius, so that they
right sink into the brain. One reads a phrase of Confucius, and it
‘ems nothing. Twenty years later one returns to think over its
eaning. When I was thirty I read a French translation, then an
nglish one, and then gradually I have profited from Fenollosa’s notes.
Ine cannot get the full meaning without analysing the ideograms.
e translates a certain ideogram* with the word ‘beclouding’, but
1¢ basic idea it conveys is one of wild vegetation which encroaches
332

A VISITING CARD
upon and grows over everything, creating a dense and tangled con-
fusion, which would imply ‘overgrowing’ in English. This ideogram-
matic component of wild vegetation with broken water, meaning
‘swamp’, is frequently encountered in ideogram lexicons,
I will leave it to some great Italian stylist to find a single word to
render this complex of graphic suggestions, and give you instead a
piece of dialogue.
Tseu Low. If the Prince of Wei appointed you head of the government,
to what would you first set your mind?
Kung-fu-tseu. To call people and things by their true and proper names.
3F.
Των Lou. You really mean that? Aren’t you dodging the question?
What's the use of that?
Kung. You’re a fat-head [a blank-a page with nothing written on it}.
An intelligent man hesitates to talk of what he don’t understand.
He feels embarrassment.
If the terminology be not exact, if it fit not the thing, the govern-
mental instructions will not be explicit; if the instructions aren't
clear and the names don't fit, you can not conduct business pro-
perly.!
It all seems too easy? The more responsibilities you have the more
you will understand the meaning.
And I have to thank Dante for having drawn our attention to a
treatise of Richard of St. Victor De Contemplatione in which the three
words cogitatio, meditatio and contemplatio are defined. —
Writing in the Lavoro Fascista of the 11 January 1942, Corrado Caja, in
an article on the cult of the ‘verbo vero’ made a contribution to clear
thinking, citing a poem beginning:
L‘apparenza e il profumo
si dilagano.*
Towards order in the state; the definition of the word. But if | have
made any contribution to criticism I have done so by introducing
the ideogrammic system. True criticism will insist on the accumula-
tion of these concrete examples, these facts, possibly small, but gristly
1 The wording of this passage from instances where the Italian does not
the Analects, XII, iii, follows the correspond, Tr.
author’s version in the Guide te Kulehur, 2 ‘Appearance and perfume inun-
p. 16, except for one or two minor date,’ Tr.
333

CIVILIZATION, MONEY AND HISTORY
nd resilient, that can’t be squashed, that insist on being taken into
onsideration, before the critic can claim to hold any opinion whatso-
ver.
Let us get together and consider certain facts of literature; let us
iark out the categories whenever it may be convenient or possible,
ut not before knowing the facts (i.c., the masterpieces, either of the
ighest intensity or superior in particular aspects), When we know
rem we can discuss them-but not painting without a knowledge of
lantegna or Manet, not poetry if we dare not make comparisons,
Italian songs include ‘Ahi ritorna l'eta dell'oro" and the stornelli of
omagna. Good, so-called ‘popular’ songs, often have this value: the
iusic renders the words without deforming them, There is no snob-
ery that the critics won't lick from the boots of an established
putation.
fter ten days’ struggle, Gino Saviotti was reduced to ‘there are days
‘hen one feels the need of a peppermint cream’ (Difesa della Poesia di
rancesco Petrarca, last chapter).
After Cavalcanti and Dante the Italian writers are those who have
ad something precise to relate, The stylists declined from the
roment they wanted to write in Latin instead of Italian.
And anyone who wrote in Latin then went and imitated his own
atered-down style in the so-called vulgar tongue (cf. De Vulgari
loquio).
France began to become tongue-tied with the Pleiade, She recovered
gain after Stendhal, who wrote badly. Gautier did not write badly-
‘hen he wrote verse.
Thought is organic. It needs these ‘gristly facts’.
The idea is not achieved until it goes into action. The idea is com-
leted by the word. It is completed by its going into action. The idea
1at does not go into action is a truncated idea. It lacks an essential
art. This does not mean, of course, that it has to go into action half
n hour after it's born.
We think because we do not know.
ROMA
ο Μ
Μ o
AMOR
I don’t know what evil plague has come to rage over Italy for four
enturies that people should want to destroy the vocabulary, the
11 mean the Italians who wrote in further on about Italian usage and
atin during the Renaissance. What I syntax.
y here doesn't contradict what | say
334

A VISITING CARD
language of Dante, and set about speaking a language of shopkeepers
and hairdressers—and not even the language of real hairdressers;
a language no hairdresser would use.
If Dante has used a word that word belongs to your language. The
same goes for ‘l'amico suo’, Cavalcanti.
‘vor
The banning of the ‘Lei! marks the beginning of the great task of
salvaging the Latin strength that underlies the decadence of the Italian
language. May this revolution continue, until we have regained the full
force of the Latin language and the Ghibelline poets!
Dammit all! one might at least consider Dante’s own terminology
in his classification of words: “pexa”, “hirsuta.” Sleek words and
shaggy words, he calls them.*
When Caesar conquered Britain he didn’t have to say ‘la sua’ every
time for ‘sua’, or ‘il vostro’ for ‘vostro’. The article ‘il’ is sometimes
superfluous.
Who denies his great-grandfather would deny his race.
It seems to me that many departures from Latin usage and syntax,
not to mention the insertion of useless words, might well be dispensed
with. They are born of ignorance, mediaeval or other.I don’tmean that
we should create a latinising snobbery, but that when a writer, faced
with a problem of style, falls into Latin syntax he should not correct it
simply because some louse of a pedagogue has decreed a ‘rule’. The
Latinist, on the other hand, should not interfere by correcting whom-
ever writes his mother tongue as he has learnt it from a speech, whose
forms have perhaps arisen from Latin as it was spoken.
It is ridiculous that when I write English I can use Latin words and
forms that you don’t dare to adopt ναι franxese); and that you are
afraid to adopt the verbal force and syntactical freedom of the Ghibel-
line poets. The damnable Della Crusca; chaff but no grain!
Amo ergo sum.
1 Polite’ form of address, discour- 2 De Vulgari Eloguio, I, vií. 7r..
aged latterly under Fascism in favour
of ‘voi’ ( Fr. ‘vous’), Tr.

Gold and Work’
1944
THE WAY OF UTOPIA
n the 10th of September last, I walked down the Via Salaria
and into the Republic of Utopia, a quiet country lying eighty
years east of Fara Sabina. Noticing the cheerful disposition of
the inhabitants, I enquired the cause of their contentment, and I was
told that it was due both to their laws and to the teaching they
received from their earliest school days.
They maintain (and in this they are in agreement with Aristotle and
other ancient sages of East and West) that our knowledge of universals
derives from our knowledge of particulars, and that thought hinges
on the definitions of words,
In order to teach small children to observe particulars they practise
a kind of game, in which a number of small objects, e.g., three grains
of barley, a small coin, a blue button, a coffee bean, or, say, one grain
of barley, three different kinds of buttons, etc., are concealed in the
hand. The hand is opened for an instant, then quickly closed again,
and the child is asked to say what it has seen. For older children the
game is gradually made more elaborate, until finally they all know
how their hats and shoes are made. I was also informed that by learn-
ing how to define words these people have succeeded in defining their
economic terms, with the result that various iniquities of the stock
market and financial world have entirely disappeared from their
country, for no one allows himself to be fooled any longer.
And they attribute their prosperity to a simple method they have of
collecting taxes or, rather, their one tax, which falls on the currency
itself. For on every note of 100 monetary units they are obliged, on the
first of every month, to affix a stamp worth one unit, And as the
government pays its expenses by the issue of new currency, it never
needs to impose other taxes. And no one can hoard this currency
because after 100 months it would have lost all its value. And this
solves the problem of circulation. And because the currency is no
more durable than commodities such as potatoes, crops, or fabrics,
Title of original work, is Or e Rapallo, 1944. This translation, by
Lawrto, in Memory of Aurelio Baisi, John Drummond was first published
Rapallo, It was first published in by Peter Russell in 1951,
336

GOLD AND WORK
the people have acquired a much healthier sense of values. They do
not worship money as a god, they do not lick che boots of bloated
financiers or syphilitics of the market-place. And of, course, they are
not menaced by inflation, and they are not compelled to make wars
to please the usurers. In fact, this profession-or criminal activity—is
extinct in the country of Utopia, where no one is obliged to work more
than five hours a day, because their mode of life makes a great deal of
bureaucratic activity unnecessary. Trade has few restraints. They
exchange their woollen and silk fabrics against coffee and groundnuts
from their African possessions, while their cattle are so numerous that
the fertiliser problem almost solves itself. But they have a very strict
law which excludes every kind of surrogate from the whole of their
republic.
Education for these people is almost a joy, and there are no redun-
dant professors. They say that it is impossible to eliminate idiotic
books, but that it is easy to distribute the antidote, and they do this by
means of a very simple system. Every bookseller is obliged to stock the
best books; some of outstanding merit must be displayed in his
window for a certain number of months each year. As they become
familiar with the best books, the disgusting messes served up periodi-
cally by The Times or the Nowvelle Revue Francaise gradually disappear from
the drawing-rooms of the more empty-headed young ladies—of both
sexes.
They attach the importance to skill in agricultural tasks that I
attached in my youth to skill at tennis or football. In fact, they have
oe contests to see who can drive the straightest furrow, As for
myself, I felt I was too old for such activities, and recalled the case ofa
young friend who had also been seized by this archaic passion; he
wrote that his first acre ‘looked as if a pig had been rooting about all
over it’.
After I had heard these very simple explanations of the happiness of
these people, I went to sleep under the Sabine stars, pondering over
the astonishing effects of these reforms, apparently so trifling, and
marvelling at the great distance separating the twentieth-century
world from the world of contentment.
Inscribed over the entrance to their Capitol are the words:
‘THE TREASURE OF A NATION IS ITS HONESTY.
PARTICULARS OF THE CRIME
It is no use assembling a machine if a part is missing or defective. One
must have all the essential parts. Fully to understand the origins of the
present war it will be useful to know that:
The Bank of England, a felonious combination or, more precisely,
a gang of usurers taking sixty per cent interest, was founded in 1694.
337

CIVILISATION, MONET AND HISTORT
Paterson, the founder of the bank, clearly stated the advantages of his
scheme: ‘the bank hath benefit of the interest on all moneys which it
creates out of nothing’. In 1750 the paper currency of the Colony of
Pennsylvania was suppressed. This meant that this confederacy of
gombeen-men, not content with their sixty per cent, namely, the
interest on the moneys they created out of nothing, had, in the fifty-
six intervening years, become powerful enough to induce the British
Government to suppress, illegally, a form of competition which had,
through a sane monetary system, brought prosperity to the colony.
Twenty-six years later, in 1776, the American colonies rebelled
against England, They were thirteen independent organs, divided
among themselves, but favoured by geographical factors and Euro-
pean discords. They conquered their perennial enemy, England, but
their revolution was betrayed by internal enemies among them. Their
difficulties might serve to stimulate Italians today, and the problems
of that time might suggest solutions in Italy now.
The imperfections of the American electoral system were at once
demonstrated by the scandal of the Congressmen who speculated in
the ‘certificates of owed pay’ that had been issued by the various Colo-
nies to the soldiers of the Revolution.
It was an old trick, and a simple one: a question of altering the value
of the monetary unit. Twenty-nine Congressmen conspired with their
associates and bought up the certificates from veterans and others at
twenty per cent of their face value. The nation, having now estab-
lished itself as an administrative unit, then ‘assumed’ responsibility for
redeeming the certificates at their full face value.
The struggle between the financial interests and the people was
continued in the battle between Jefferson and Hamilton, and still more
openly when the people were led by Jackson and Van Buren. The
decade between 1830 and 1840 has practically disappeared from the
school-books. The economic facts behind the American ‘Civil’ War
are extremely interesting. After the Napoleonic wars, after the ‘Civil’
ono, after Versailles, the same phenomena may be observed.
Usurocracy makes wars in succession. It makes them according to
a pre-established plan for the purpose of creating debts.
For every debt incurred when a bushel of grain is worth a certain
sum of money, repayment is demanded when it requires five bushels
or more to raise the same sum. This is accompanied by much talk of
devaluation, inflation, revaluation, deflation, and a return to gold.
By returning to gold, Mr. Churchill forced the Indian peasant to pay
two bushels of grain in taxes and interest which a short time before
he had been able to pay with one only,
* Quoted by Christopher Hollis: The Two Nations, Chapter Ill, See also Pound’s
Canto XLVI, Tr,
338

GOLD AND WORK
C. H. Douglas, Arthur Kitson, Sir Montagu Webb give the details,
The United States were sold to the Rothschilds in 1863. The Americans
have taken eighty years to discover the facts that are still unknown in
Europe. Some of them were made known in Congress by Charles A.
Lindbergh, the aviator's father, and later included by Willis A. Over-
holser in his History of Money in the United States,
A letter from the London banking firm of Rothschild Bros., dated
25 June 1863, addressed to the New York bank of Ikleheimer, Morton
& Van der Gould, contains the following words of fire:
“Very few people
‘will understand this. Those who do will be occupied
‘getting profits. The genera! public will probably not
‘see it’s against their interest.”
The favourite tricks of the usurocracy are simple, and the word
‘money’ is not defined in the clerks’ manual issued by the Rothschilds,
nor in the official vocabulary “Synonyms and Homonyms of Banking
Terminology’. The tricks are simple: taking usury at sixty per cent and
upwards, and altering the value of the integer of account at moments
advantageous to themselves.
IGNORANCE
Ignorance of these tricks is not a natural phenomenon; it is brought
about artificially. It has been fostered by the silence of the press, in
Italy as much as anywhere else. What is more, it has been patiently and
carefully built up. The true basis of credit was already known to the
founders of the Monte dei Paschi of Siena at the beginning of the
seventeenth century.
This basis was, and is, the abundance, or productivity, of nature
together with the responsibility of the whole people.
There are useful and potentially honest functions for banks and
bankers. One who provides a measure of prices in the market and at
the same time a means of exchange is useful to the nation. But one
who falsifies this measure and this means is a criminal,
A sound banking policy aims, and in the past has aimed, as Lord
Overstone (Samuel Loyd) has said, ‘to meet the real wants of
?The Italian text follows the ably to be identified with the Ameri-
author's own paraphrase in Canto can statesman who was then Senator
XLVI, which is therefore used here. for Ohio and later Secretary of the
These particular words are quoted Treasury. Overholser gives the full
(enthusiastically) from a letter re- text in the fourth chapter of his
ceived by the Rothschild firm from ‘a book. Tr.
certain Mr John Sherman’, presum-

CIVILISATION, MONEY AND HISTORY
commerce, and to discount all commercial bills arising out of legiti-
mate transactions’.*
Nevertheless, at a certain moment at about the beginning of the
century, Brooks Adams was moved to write:
Perhaps no financier has ever lived abler than Samuel Loyd.
Certainly he understood as few men, even of later generations,
have understood, the mighty engine of the single standard. He
comprehended that, with expanding trade, an inelastic currency
must rise in value; he saw that, with sufficient resources at com-
mand, his class might be able to establish such a rise, almost at
pleasure; certainly that they could manipulate it when it came, by
taking advantage of foreign exchange. He perceived moreover that,
once established, a contraction of the currency might be forced to
an extreme, and that when money rose beyond price, as in 1825,
debtors would have to surrender their property on such terms as
creditors might dictate.”
So now you understand why the B.B.C., proclaiming theliberation of
Europe, and of Italy in particular, never replies to the question: And the
liberty of not getting into debt—how about that?
And you will understand why Brooks Adams wrote that after
Waterloo no power had been able to resist the force of the usurers.*
And you will understand why Mussolini was condemned twenty
years ago by the central committee of the usurocracy. And why wars
are made, i.¢., in order to create debts which must be paid in appre—
ciated money, or not paid at all, according to circumstances.
War is the highest form of sabotage, the most atrocious form of
sabotage. Usurers provoke wars to impose monopolies in their own
interests, so that they can get the world by the throat. Usurers provoke
wars to create debts, so that they can extort the interest and rake in the
profits resulting from changes in the values of monetary units.
If this is not clear to the novice, let him read and meditate the follow-
ing sentences from the Hazard Circular of the year 1862:
The great debt that (our friends the) capitalists (of Europe) will
see to it is made out of the war must be used to control the volume
of money. .. . It will not do to allow the greenback, as it is called,
to circulate ... for we cannot control them (i.c., their issue, etc.).*
! Quoted by Brooks Adams; The * Quoted by Overholser, ep. cit.
Law of Civilization and Desay (new edi- Chapter IV, Also by H. Jerry Voorhis:
tion), Knopf, New York, 1943, pp. Extension of Remarks in the House of
307-8. Tr. Representatives, 6 June 1938, Congres-
? Brooks Adams, op. cit., p. 315. Tr. sional Record, Appendix, Vol. 83, Part I,
*id, pp. 306, 310, 326-7, and P 263 Ir
Chapter XI generally. Tr.

GOLD AND WORK
In fact, after the assassination of President Lincoln no serious
measures against the usurocracy were attempted until the formation
of the Rome-Berlin Axis, Italy’s ambition to achieve economic liberty
—the liberty of not getting into debt-provoked the unleashing of the
ever-accursed sanctions.
But the great Italian publishing houses, more or less open accom-
plices of the perfidious Italian press, have not published the works of
Brooks Adams and Arthur Kitson in which these facts are given. The
press has been perfidious and the great publishing houses have been
more or less conscious accomplices according to their capacity, One
cannot hope to prevail against bad faith by making known the facts,
but one might against ignorance. The publishers have received their
information through certain channels; they have taken their tone
from The Times Literary Supplement and from books distributed through
Hachette and W. H. Smith & Son, or approved by the Nowelle Revue
Francaise.
Nothing, or practically nothing, has arrived in Italy that has not
been picked over by the international usurers and their blind or shifty-
eyed servitors. And the result is to be seen in an artificially created
ignorance and snobbery. Neomalthusianism needs looking into. In
Italy, as elsewhere, crime fiction has served to distract attention from
the great underlying crime, the crime of the usurocratic system itself.
If this may seem of no importance to politicians and men of action, it
has nonetheless created a vast blockage of passive inertia in the very
so-called ‘literary’ or ‘cultured’ circles which set the tone of printed
matter, They read, they write, and the public gets the sweepings. And
from this dishwashing process derives the carputrry that has con-
taminated a great part of the public with the ‘English disease’, namely,
a pathological disposition to believe the fantastic tales put out from
London and disseminated gratis by indigenous simpletons.
Of the liberals (who are not always usurers) we would ask, Why are
usurers always liberals?
Of those who demand the dictatorship of the proletariat we would
ask, Must the proletariat of one country impose dictatorship on the
proletariat of another?
To those who inveigh against the concept of autarchy, saying it costs
too much; that grain should be bought in the cheapest market-we
would recall that it was precisely the importing of cheap grain from
Egypt that ruined Italian agriculture under the Roman Empire. And
if this fact appears too remote from our own times, it may be noted
that those who speak of this kind of free trade usually end up by talk-
ing about the export of labour, that is, the export of workers, the export
of human beings, in exchange for commodities
Many are beginning to understand that England, in her sadistic
attempt to destroy Italy, is destroying herself, though the public still
MI

CIVILISATION, MONEY AND HISTORY
fails to understand the origin of this mania for destruction. Deny, if
you like, that the purely and exclusively economic man exists, yet the
analysis of economic motives is useful for an understanding of avarice,
The greed for monopoly is a fundamental evil. It may be seen in the
transgression of the unjust price, condemned by the economic doc-
trine of the Church throughout the period of its greatest splendour,
It must be understood that the whole of the current taste in litera-
ture and the entire journalistic system are controlled by the inter-
national usurocracy, which aims at preserving intact the public’s
ignorance of the usurocratic system and its workings. The details of
the military betrayal are known, but the intellectual betrayal has not
yet been understood. Ignorance of this system and these mechanisms
is not a natural phenomenon; it has been created.
Liberalism and Bolshevism are in intimate agreement in their funda-
mental contempt for the human personality. Stalin ‘disposes’ of forty
truckloads of human ‘material’ for work on a canal. We find the
liberals talking about the export of ‘labour’.
Liberalism conceals its baneful economics under two pretexts: the
freedom of the spoken and written word, and the freedom of the
individual, protected, in theory, by trial in open court, guaranteed
by the formula of habeas corpus. Enquire in India, or in England, to what
extent these pretexts are respected. Ask any American journalist what
freedom of expression is left him by the big advertisers.
Some further items of useful knowledge:
(1) We need a means of exchange and a means of saving, but it does
not follow that the means must be the same in each case,
(2) The state can Lenn. The fleet that was victorious at Salamis was
built with money lent to the shipbuilders by the Athenian state.
(3) To simplify both government and private management, a system
which can operate at the counter, whether of a government or private
office, is preferable.
A NATION THAT WILL NOT GET ITSELF INTO DEBT
DRIVES THE USURERS TO FURY
THE PIVOT
All trade hinges on money. All industry hinges on money. Money is
the pivot. Itis the middle term, It stands midway between industry and
workers, The pure economic man may not exist, but the economic
factor, in the problem of living, exists. If you live on clichés and lose
your respect for words, you will lose your ‘ben dell‘ intelletto‘.?
1 Dance, Inf. If, 18, ‘Homely english thing nearer to Mencius meaning: ...
wd. get that down to ‘USE OF YOUR sense of EQUITY' EP. in a radio
wits’ but I reckon Dante meant some- speech, see If This he Treason, p. 32. Tr,
342

GOLD AND WORK
Trade brought prosperity to Liguria; usury lost it Corsica. But in
losing the ability to distinguish between trade and usury one loses all
sense of the historical process. There has been some vague talk in
recent months about an international power, described as financial,
but it would be better to call it ‘usurocracy’, or the rule of the big
usurers combined in conspiracy. Not the gun merchants, but the
traffickers in money itself have made this war; they have made wars in
succession, for centuries, at their own pleasure, to create debts so that
they can enjoy the interest on them, to create debts when money is
cheap in order to demand repayment when money is dear.
But as long as the word ‘money’ is not clearly defined and as long
as its definition is not known to all the peoples of the world, they will
go blindly to war with each other, never knowing the reason why.
This war was no whim of Mussolini's, nor of Hitler's. This war is a
chapter in the long and bloody tragedy which began with the founda-
tion of the Bank of England in far-away 1694, with the openly declared
intention of Paterson's now famous prospectus, which contains the
words already quoted: ‘the bank hath benefit of the interest on all
moneys which it creates out of nothing’.
To understand what this means it is necessary to understand what
money is. Money is not a simple instrument like a spade. It is made up
of two elements: one which measures the prices on the market, one
which bestows the power to purchase the goods. It is this twofold
aspect that the usurers have taken advantage of. You know well
enough that a watch contains two principles, a mainspring and a hair-
spring, with a train of wheels between the two. But if someone asks
you what money is, you don’t know what the ten-lire notes and the
twenty-centesimi pieces, which you have in your pockets, are.
Until the seventh century after Christ, when an Emperor of the
T'ang Dynasty issued state notes (state notes, not bank notes, mind
you), the world was practically compelled to use as money a deter-
mined quantity of some commonly used commodity, such as salt or
gold according to the degree of local sophistication, But since A.D. 654,
at least, this metal has no longer been necessary for trading between
civilised people. The state note of the T'ang Dynasty, of the year 856,
which is still in existence, has an inscription almost identical with the
one you read on your ten-lire notes.
The note measures the price, not the value; or in other words,
prices are calculated in monetary units. But who supplies these notes?
And, before the present war, who controlled the issue of international
money? If you want to discover the causes of the present war, try and
find out who controlled international money, and how it came under
such control.
For the moment I will give you only one hint from the history of
the United States of America:
343

CIVILISATION, MONEY AND HISTORY
The great debt that (our friends the) capitalists (of Europe) will
see to it is made out of the war must be used to control the volume
of money. . . . It will not do to allow the greenback, as it is called, to
circulate . .. for we cannot control them.*
This is from the Hazard Circular of the year 1862. It seems to me that
a similar situation existed in 1939. | would say that Italy, not wanting to
get herself into debt, drove the great usurers to fury. Think it over!
And think of the nature of money itself, and of the economists’
invariable irresponsibility when we ask them to define such words as
money, credit, interest, and usury.
If we are going to talk about monetary policy, monetary reform, or
a monetary revolution, we must know first of all exactly what money
is.
THE ENEMY
The enemy is ignorance (our own). At the beginning of the nineteenth
century John Adams (Pater Patriae) saw that the defects and errors of
the American government derived not so much from the corruption
of government officials as from ignorance of coin, credit, and circula-
tion.
The situation is the same today. The subject is considered too dry
by those who do not understand its significance. For example, at
about the end of last December a banker boasted to me that at a
certain period he could remember Italian paper money was worth
more than gold, One concludes that in that particular ‘golden age’
the Rothschilds were wanting to purchase gold cheap, in order to
send its price rocketing later.
In the same way the Sassoons and their accomplices profited from
the slump in silver. At one period, in fact, silver fell to 23 cents per
ounce, and was later bought by certain American idiots at 75 cents per
ounce, in order to please their masters and to ‘save India’, where, with
the return to gold, Mr. Churchill, as we have remarked, forced the
peasants to pay two bushels of grain in taxes and interest which a short
time before could have been paid with only one.
To combat this rigging of the gold and silver markets we must know
what money is. Today money is a disk of metal or aslip of paper which
serves to measure prices and which confers, on its possessor, the right
to receive in exchange any goods on sale in the market up to a price
equal to the figure indicated on the disk or slip of paper, without any
formality other than the transfer of the money from hand to hand.
Thus money differs from a special coupon, such as a railway or theatre
ticket.
* See note 4 p. 340, above. Tr,
344

GOLD AND WORK
This universal quality confers special privileges on money which the
special coupon does not possess. Of these I will speak another time.
Besides this tangible money, there is also intangible money, called
‘money on account’, which is used in accounting and banking trans-
actions. This intangibility belongs to a discussion of credit rather than
a treatise on money.
Our immediate need is to clarify current conceptions with regard to
the so-called ‘work-money’, and to make clear that money cannot
be a ‘symbol of work’ without any other qualification. It could be a
‘certificate of work done’ on condition that the work is done within a sys—
tem. The validity of the certificate would depend on the honesty of
the system, and on the authority of the certifier. And the certificate
would have to refer to some work useful-or at least pleasurable-to
the community.
An item of work not yet completed would serve as an element of
credit rather than as a basis for money properly understood. Speaking
metaphorically, one might call credit the ‘future tense of money’.
The elaborate assay procedure of mints has been developed to
guarantee the quality and quantity of the metal in coined money; no
less elaborate precautions would be necessary to guarantee the quality,
quantity, and appropriateness of the work which will serve as the basis
for what is to be called ‘work-money’ (meaning ‘certificate-of-work-
done-money’).
The same frauds of accounting practised by the gombeen-men of the
past in order to swindle the public under a metallic monetary system
will, of course, be attempted by the gombeen-men of the future in
their attacks on social justice, irrespective of the kind of monetary
system that may be established. And they will be just as likely to
succeed unless the nature and workings of these practices have been
fully understood by the public-or at least by an alert and efficient
minority.
It is only one plague-spot that the creation of work-money would
eliminate. I mean that the advantages of the gold-standard system
lauded by the bankers are advantages for the bankers only—for some
bankers only, in fact. Social justice demands equal advantages for all.
The advantage of work-money mainly derives from one fact alone:
work cannot be monopolised. And this is the very reason for the bitter
opposition, for the uproar of protest, natural and artificial, which
issues from the ranks of the gombeen-men, whether they be exotic or
indigenous.
The idea that work might serve as a measure of prices was already
current in the eighteenth century, and was clearly expounded by
Benjamin Franklin.
As for monopolisability: no one is such a fool as to let someone else
have the run of his own private bank account; yet nations,
345

CIVILISATION, MONET AND) ΘΈΝΑ
individuals, industrialists, and businessmen have all been quite pre-
pared-almost eager-to leave the control of their national currencies,
and of international money, in the hands of the most stinking dregs of
humanity.
Work cannot be monopolised, The function of work as @ measure is
beginning to be understood. The principle has been clearly put before
the Italian public as, for example, when the Regime Fascista reports that
the Russian worker must pay 380 working hours for an overcoat which
a German worker can procure with only 80.
An article by Fernando Ritter in the Fascio of Milan, 7 January 1944,
refers to money not in generic words and abstract terms such as
‘capital’ and ‘finance’, but in terms of grain and fertilisers.
As for the validity of primitive forms of money such as a promissory
note written on leather, we have C. H. Douglas’s memorable comment
that it was valid enough as long as the man who promised to pay an ox
had an ox.
In the same way the certificates of work done will be valid provided
that the utility of the work doneis honestly estimated by some proper
authority.
It should be remembered that the soil does not require monetary
compensation for the wealth extracted from it. With her wonderful
efficiency nature sees to it that the circulation of material capital and
its fruits is maintained, and that what comes out of the soil goes back
into the soil with majestic rhythm, despite human interference.
THE TOXICOLOGY OF MONEY
Money is not a product of nature but an invention of man. And man
has made it into a pernicious instrument through lack of foresight.
The nations have forgotten the differences between animal, vegetable,
and mineral; or rather, finance has chosen to represent all three of
the natural categories by a single means of exchange, and failed to
take account of the consequences. Metal is durable, but it does not
reproduce itself. If you sow gold you will not be able to reap a harvest
many times greater than the gold you sowed. The vegetable leads a
more or less autonomous existence, but its natural reproductiveness
can be increased by cultivation. The animal gives to and takes from the
vegetable world: manure in exchange for food.
Fascinated by the lustre of a metal, man made it into chains. Then he
invented something against nature, a false representation in the
mineral world of laws which apply only to animals and vegetables.
The nineteenth century, the infamous century of usury, went even
further, creating a species of monetary Black Mass. Marx and Mill, in
spite of their superficial differences, agreed in endowing money with
346

GOLD AND WORK
properties of a quasi-religious nature, There was even the concept of
energy being ‘concentrated in money’, as if one were speaking of the
divine quality of consecrated bread. But a half-lira piece has never
created the cigarette or the piece of chocolate that used, in pre-war
days, to issue from the slot-machine.
The durability of metal gives it certain advantages not possessed by
potatoes or tomatoes. Anyone who has a stock of metal can keep it
until conditions are most favourable for exchanging it against less
durable goods, Hence the earliest forms of speculation on the part
of those in possession of metals-especially those metals which are
comparatively rare and do not rust.
But in addition to this potentiality for unjust manipulation inherent
in metallic money by virtue of its being metallic, man has invented a
document provided with coupons to serve as a more visible represen-
tation of usury. And usury is a vice, or a crime, condemned by all
religions and by every ancient moralist. For example, in Cato’s De Re
Rustica we find the following piece of dialogue:
‘And what do you think of usury?’
“What do you think of murder?’
And Shakespeare: ‘Or is your gold . . . ewes and rams?’
No! it is not money that is the root of the evil. The root is greed, the
lust for monopoly. ‘CarraNns ANNONAM, MALEDICTUS IN PLEBE st!’ thun-
dered St. Ambrose-‘Hoggers of harvest, cursed among the people!’
The opportunity of dishonest dealing was already offered to the
possessors of gold at the dawn of history, But what man has made he
can unmake, All that is needed is to devise a kind of money that
cannot be kept waiting in the safe until such time as it may be most
advantageous for its owner to bring it out, The power to swindle the
people by means of coined or printed money would thus disappear
almost automatically.
The idea is not new. Bishops in the Middle Ages were already issuing
money that was recalled to the mint for recoining after a definite
period. The German, Gesell, and the Italian, Avigliano, almost con-
temporaneously, devised a still more interesting means of achieving
a greater economic justice. They proposed a paper-money system by
which everyone was obliged, on the first of the month, to affix a stamp
on every note he possessed equal to one per cent of the note‘s face
value.
This system has given such praiseworthy results in certain restricted
areas where it has been put into operation, that it is the duty of any far-
sighted nation to give it serious consideration. The means is simple.
It is not beyond the mental capacity of a peasant. Anyone is capable
of sticking a stamp on an envelope, or on a receipted hotel bill.
From the humanitarian point of view, the advantage of this form of
taxation over all others is that it can only fall on persons who have,
347

CIVILISATION, MONEY AND HISTORY
at the moment the tax falls due, money in their pockets worth 100
times the tax itself.
Another advantage is that it doesn’t interfere with trade or discour-
age building activity; it falls only on superfluous money, namely on
the money that the holder has not been obliged to spend in the course
of the preceding month.
As a remedy for inflation its advantages will be seen immediately,
Inflation consists in a superfluity of money. Under Gesell’s system each
issue of notes consumes itself in 100 months-eight years and four
months-thus bringing to the treasury a sum equal to the original
issue.
(To make this still clearer, imagine a note left in the safe for 100
months, It will be a note on strike which, for 100 months, fails to
function as a means of exchange and does not serve its purpose. Well
then, the tax on this laziness will equal its face value. On the other
hand, a note that passes from hand to hand can play its part in
hundreds of transactions each month before it has to be taxed at
all.
Ὃν expense of numerous departments whose present function is
to squeeze taxes out of the public would be reduced to a minimum
and practically vanish. Office workers don’t go to the office to amuse
themselves. They could be given the chance of spending their time
as they liked, or of raising the cultural level of their social circle, while
still receiving their present salaries, without the need of diminishing
the material wealth of Italy by a single bushel of grain, or by a litre of
wine. Those who are not studiously inclined would have time to
produce something useful.
A cardinal error of so-called liberal economics has been to forget the
difference between food and stuff you can neither eat nor clothe
yourself with. A republican! realism should call the public’s attention
to certain fundamental realities.
Philip Gibbs, writing of Italy for Anglo-American readers, cannot see
that anything can be done with a product except sell it. The idea of
using it does not penetrate the Bolshevik-Liberal psychology,
THE ERROR
The error has been pecuniolatry, or the making of money into a god. This
was due to a process of denaturalisation, by which our money has been
given false attributes and powers that it should never have possessed.
Gold is durable, but does not reproduce itself—not even if you put
two bits of it together, one shaped like a cock, the other like a hen,
* At the time of writing the Fascist northern Italy, while ‘liberated’ Italy
Social Republic was established in was still a monarchy. Tr.
348

GOLD AND WORK
It is absurd to speak of it as bearing fruit or yielding interest. Gold does
not germinate like grain, To represent gold as doing this is to represent
it falsely. It is a falsification. And the term ια della moneta’
(counterfeiting or false-coining) may perhaps be derived from this.
To repeat: we need a means of exchange and a means of saving, but
it does not follow that the means must be the same in each case. We
are not forced to use a hammer for an awl.
The stamp affixed to the note acts as the hair-spring in the watch.
Under the usurocratic system the world has suffered from alternate
waves of inflation and deflation, of too much money and too little.
Everyone can understand the function of a pendulum or hair-spring.
Asimilar mental grasp should be brought to bear in the field of money.
A sound economic system will be attained when money has neither
too much nor too little potential. The distinction between trade and
usury has been lost. The distinction between debt and interest-bearing
debt has been lost. As long ago as 1878 the idea of non-interest-bearing
debt was current-even of non-interest-bearing national debt. The interest
that you have received in the past has been largely an illusion: it has
functioned on a short-term basis leaving you with a sum of money
arithmetically somewhat greater than that which you had ‘saved’, but
expressed in a currency whose units have lost a part of their value
in the meantime.
Dexter Kimball collected statistics of American rail bonds issued over
a period of half a century, and made interesting discoveries as to the
proportion of these obligations that had simply been annulled for one
reason or another. If my memory doesn’t betray me, the figure was
as high as seventy per cent.
That industrial concerns and plants should pay interest on their
borrowed capital is just, because they serve to increase production.
But the world has lost the distinction between production and cor-
rosion. Unpardonable imbecility ! for this distinction was known in the
earliest years of recorded history. To represent something corrosive
as something productive is a falsification-a forgery. Only fools believe
in false representations. Give money its correct potential; make it last
as long as things last in the material world; give it, above all, its due
advantage (ie., that of being exchangeable for any goods at any
moment, provided the goods in question exist)-but do not give
money, beyond this advantage, powers that correspond neither to
justice nor to the nature of the goods it is issued against or used to
purchase. This is the way that leads to social justice and economic
sanity.
MILITARY VALOUR
There can be no military valour in a climate of intellectual cowardice.
No individual should get angry if the community refuses to accept
249

CIVILISATION, MONEY AND HISTORY
his proposals, but it is intellectual cowardice if one is afraid to formu-
late one’s own concept of society. This is all the more so at a time full
of possibilities, at a time when the formulation of a new system of
government is announced. Everyone who has some competence as an
historian, and is in possession of certain historical facts, should formu-
late his concepts in relation to that part of the social organism in
which his studies have given him authority to act as a judge.
To cultivate this competence in future generations one must begin,
in the schools, with the observation of particular objects, as an intro-
duction to the apprehension of particular facts in history. The indivi-
dual does not necd to know everything on an encyclopaedic scale,
but everyone with any kind of public responsibility must have know-
ledge of the essential facts of the problem he has to deal with. It begins
with the game of the objects shown to the child for an instant in the
hand that is then quickly closed again.
Thought hinges on the definition of words, Aristotle and Confucius
bear witness. I would conclude the compulsory studies of every
university student with a comparison-even a brief one—between the
two major works of Aristotle (the Nichomachean Ethics and the Politics),
on the one hand, and, on the other, the Four Books of China (i.e.,
the three classics of the Confucian tradition-the Ta Hsieh or ‘Great
Learning’,! The Unwobbling Axis,* and the Analects-together with the
Works of Mencius).
Extra-university education and that of the public in general could
be taken care of by means of a simple ordinance relating to bookshops:
every bookseller should be obliged to stock and, in the case of certain
more important works, display in the window for a determined
number of weeks per year certain books of capital importance.
Anyone who is familiar with the masterpieces, especially those of
Aristotle, Confucius, Demosthenes, together with Davanzati’s® ‘Taci-
tus’, will not be taken in by the nasty messes now offered to the public.
As for money, it will be enough if everyone thinks for himself of the
principle of the hair-spring, of the national and social effects, in other
words, that would result from the mere application of a stamp in the
most appropriate place, Better on the currency note than on the
receipted hotel bill.
One used to speak of ‘Cavalieri di San Giorgio’, never identifying
them with due precision. Money can cause injury, and economic
1 ‘Studio Maturo‘ in the text. Tr. * Bernardo Davanzati (1529-1606),
% i.e., the Clung Yimg, or ‘Doctrine of celebrated translator of Tacitus, Tr
the Just Mean’, rendered in the text as ‘Italian nickname for gold sover-
‘L'Asse che non Vacilla’. The author's tigns, Tr.
latest rendering of this title is The
Unwobbling Pivot’. Tr,

GOLD AND WORK
knowledge is today about as crude as was medical science when it was
realised that a broken leg was damaging but when the effects of germs
were unknown. It is not so much the money that buys a Badoglio,
but the hidden work of interest that is everywhere gnawing away,
corroding, This is not the interest paid to the private individual on his
bank account, but interest on money that does not exist, on a mirage
of money; interest equivalent to sixty per cent and over as opposed to
money that represents honest work or goods useful to mankind,
To repeat: the distinction between production and corrosion has
been lost; and so has the distinction between the sharing-out of the
fruits of work done in collaboration (a true and just dividend, called
partaggio in the Middle Ages) and the corrosive interest that represents
no increase in useful and material production of any sort.
It is, of course, useless to indulge in antisemitism, leaving intact the
Hebraic monetary system which is a most tremendous instrument of
usury.
And we would ask the Mazzinians why they never read those pages
of the Duties of Man which deal with banks.
BULLETIN OF CIVIC DISCIPLINE
Arguments are caused by the ignorance of att the disputants.
Until you have clarified your own thought within yourself you can-
not communicate it to others.
Until you have brought order within yourself you cannot become an
element of order in the party,
The fortune of war depends on the honesty of the régime.
351

Sovereignty"
who does not possess this power is a mere rex sacrificulus, non
regnans.
If this power be handed over to a group of irresponsible crooks
and/or idiots, the country will not be well governed. In a republic,
where the citizen has rights and responsibilities, the citizen who will
not inspect the problem of monetary issue is simply not exercising
his functions as citizen,
To be distracted by questions of administrative forms, race hatreds,
man hunts, or socialisation of everything but the national debt, is
merely swallowing sucker-bait.
yo dis inheres in the power to issue money. The sovereign
3 The European 1, March 1953.
Del Mar’
he imbecility of striking for higher wages while leaving the
control of the purchasing power of those wages in the hands
of extortioners is not monopolised by the labour Parties. Del
Mar struggled in vain to inculcate the notion that a coin is not a
unit but the fraction of a larger unit, still called the ‘volume of
money’.
1 Agenda 1, January 1959.
352

Feasible Justice’
sane and decent tax system should, and if you grant the
possibility of the electors having even a small particle of good
sense, could have the following characteristics.
1. Aiming at feasible justice it could, as Mencius said it should,
consist in a share of the available products. Mencius used very con—
siderable lucidity in demanding a share, not a fixed charge, which
latter might not be available in a poor farm year, or produce in a rich
year a reserve against famine or future contingency.
2. The system should aim at minimum cost of collection. Mr.
Jefferson had some pithy remarks on the price of tobacco in France,
in relation to what the producer got, what the government got as
profit, and the cost of gouging out of consumers.
3. The convenience of the collection should be considered, though
this might be considered as component in the cost of same,
4. It should encourage production, not sabotage it. | have a letter of
decades back suggesting that I specialise in examining taxation as
highway robbery. The Secolo of Genoa recently managed to print a line
referring to the current tax system as ‘un furto organizzato che
punisce ogni atto produttivo’. The mills grind slowly. It takes time to
get simple ideas past a copy desk.
5. It should not create crime, i.¢. it should not penalize simple and
often useful activities, by making them crimes by statute, The boot-
legger in the A.H. of the army understood perfectly well that his
profession could only function when there was a tax on, or prohibition
of booze (1959).
* Impact (1960).
* Taxes for public utility,
ashare of a product’, (Canto XCIX). Ed.
353

Gists*
BOURGEOIS
What the working man becomes the moment he has the least oppor-
tunity.
SPENDING
The value of a nation’s money depends, in the long run, on what the
nation (which includes its inhabitants) spends its money Por.
A SLAVE
A slave is one who waits for someone else to free him.
THIERS
Thiers borrowed from the bank at 3 per cent when they were charging
individuals 5 or 6 per cent. He then got money for 1 per cent. When he
proposed to follow Andrew Jackson, the whole set of "em, Orleanists,
Bourbons, Bonapartists ganged up against him. Hence the lack of
interest in Thiers on the part of professorial historians.
CRITICS
To be judged far more by their selections than by their palaver,
CERTAIN CIRCLES
Any proposal for reduction of government personnel causes a curious
uneasiness in cestain circles.
BOURGEOIS
A term of abuse applied by young writers to writers seven years older
than themselves when the latter can afford seven francs more per day
for hotel bills.
NATIONAL WELL BEING
No country can suppress truth and live well.
+ Impact, 1960.
354

GISTS
POISON
It is not arsenic in bottle and labelled that is dangerous, but arsenic in
good soup.
LAW
The right aim of law is to prevent coercion, either by force or by fraud.
UTOPIA
Where every man has the right to be born free of debt and to be
judged, in case of disagreement, by a jury capable of understanding the
nature and implications of the charges against him.
ONE AT A TIME
Every man has the right to have his ideas examined one at a time.
USURY
Usury, a charge for the use of purchasing power, levied without
regard to production, sometimes without regard even to the possibili-
ties of production.
SOVEREIGNTY
Sovereignty inheres in the power to issue money, or to distribute the
power to buy (credit or money) whether you have the right to do so
or not.
CIVILISATION
Civilisation depends on local control of purchasing power needed for
local purposes.
355

   
I Sel eo N
s .a
o E 45 j Vy * u
   
Fe

PART SEVEN
The Art of Poetry


PART SEVEN
The Wisdom of Poetry"
which has been mercifully forgotten, a book displaying con-
siderable vigorous, inaccurate thought, fathomless ignorance,
and no taste whatever, claimed, among other things less probable, that
it presented the first ‘scientific and satisfactory definition of poetry’.
The definition ran as follows: ‘Poetry is the expression of insensuous
thought in sensuous terms by means of artistic trope, and the dignifi-
cation of thought by analogically articulated imagery.’ The word
‘artistic’ remains undefined and we have, therefore, one unknown
thing defined in terms of another unknown thing of similar nature;
a mode of definition neither ‘scientific’ nor ‘satisfactory’-even though
one should agree with the dogma of trope.
There follows this ‘more extended definition’: ‘Poetry is the expres-
sion of imaginative thought by means only of the essentials to
thought, conserving energy for thought perception—to which end all
animate, inanimate and intangible things may assume the properties
and attributes of tangible, living, thinking and speaking things, pos-
sessing the power of becoming what they seem, or of transfiguration
into what they suggest.’
This is applicable in part to the equations of analytics, in toto to paint-
ing, sculpture and certain other arts; for it is nonsense to consider
words as the only ‘essentials to thought’; some people think in
terms of objects themselves, some in pictures, diagrams, or in musical
sounds, and perception by symbolic vision is swifter and more com-
plex than that by ratiocination.
Throughout the volume our scientist shows himself incapable of
distinguishing between poetry and a sort of florid rhetorical bombast,
but the definitions quoted do not suffice to prove his ignorance of his
subject. They betray rather his confused mode of thought and his
nescience of the very nature of definition, I shall assume that any
definition to be ‘scientific’ or ‘satisfactory’ should have at least four
parts; itshould define with regard to: purpose or function; to relation;
to substance; to properties,
Poetry, as regards its function or purpose, has the common purpose
A book which was causing some clatter about a year ago, and
1 Forum, New York, April 1912.
359

THE ART OF POETRY
of the arts, which purpose Dante most clearly indicates in the line
where he speaks of:
‘That melody which most doth draw
The soul unto itself.”
Borrowing a terminology from Spinoza, we might say: The function
of an art is to free the intellect from the tyranny of the affects, or,
leaning on terms, neither technical nor metaphysical: the function
of an art is to strengthen the perceptive faculties and free them from
encumbrance, such encumbrances, for instance, as set moods, set
ideas, conventions; from the results of experience which is common
but unnecessary, experience induced by the stupidity of the experi-
encer and not by inevitable laws of nature, Thus Greek sculpture
freed men’s minds from the habit of considering the human body
merely with regard to its imperfections. The Japanese grotesque frees
the mind from the conception of things merely as they have been seen,
With the art of Beardsley we enter the realm of pure intellect; the
beauty of the work is wholly independent of the appearance of the
things portrayed. With Rembrandt we are brought to consider the
exact nature of things seen, to consider the individual face, not the
conventional or type face which we may have learned to expect on
canvas.
Poetry is identical with the other arts in this main purpose, that
is, of liberation; it differs from them in its media, to wit, words
as distinct from pigment, pure sound, clay and the like, It shares
its media with music in so far as words are composed of inarticulate
sounds,
Our scientist reaching toward a truth speaks of ‘the essentials to
thought’; these are not poetry, but a constituent substance of poetry.
The Art of Poetry consists in combining these ‘essential to thought’,
these dynamic particles, si ficet, this radium, with that melody of
words which shall most draw the emotions of the hearer toward
accord with their import, and with that ‘form’ which shall most
delight the intellect.
By ‘melody’ I mean variation of sound quality, mingling with a
variation of stress, By ‘form’ I mean the arrangement of the verse [sic],
into ballades, canzoni, and the like symmetrical forms, or into blank
verse or into free verse, where presumably, the nature of the thing
expressed or of the person supposed to be expressing it, is antagonistic
to external symmetry, Form may delight by its symmetry or by its
aptness,
The methods of this fusing, tempering and shaping concern the
artist; the results alone are of import to the public,
Poets in former ages were of certain uses to the community; i.e., as
360

THE WISDOM OF POETRY
historians, genealogists, religious functionaries. In Provence the gai
savoir was both theatre and opera. The troubadour and jongleur were
author, dramatist, composer, actor and popular tenor. In Tuscany the
canzone and the sonnet held somewhat the place of the essay and the
short story. Elizabethan drama appeared at a time when it was a
society fad to speak beautifully. Has the poet, apart from these obso-
lete and accidental uses, any permanent function in society? I attempt
the following scientific answers:
Thought is perhaps important to the race, and language, the
medium of thought’s Preservation, is constantly wearing out. It has
been the function of poets to new-mint the speech, to supply the
vigorous terms for prose. Thus Tacitus is full of Vergilian half lines;
and poets may be ‘kept on’ as conservators of the public speech, or
prose, perhaps, becoming more and more an art, may become, or may
have become already, self-sustaining.
As the poet was, in ages of faith, the founder and emendor of all
religions, so, in ages of doubt, is he the final agnostic; that which the
philosopher presents as truth, the poet presents as that which appears
as truth to a certain sort of mind under certain conditions.
‘To thine own self be true. .. .’ were nothing were it not spoken by
Polonius, who has never called his soul his own.
The poet is consistently agnostic in this; that he does not postulate
his ignorance as a positive thing. Thus his observations rest as the
enduring data of philosophy. He grinds an axe for no dogma. Now
that mechanical science has realised his ancient dreams of flight and
sejunct communication, he is the advance guard of the psychologist
on the watch for new emotions, new vibrations sensible to faculties as
yet ill understood. As Dante writes of the sunlight coming through
the clouds from a hidden source and illuminating part of a field, long
before the painters had depicted such effects of light and shade, so are
later watchers on the alert for colour perceptions of a subtler sort,
neither affirming them to be ‘astral’ or ‘spiritual’ nor denying the
formulae of theosophy. The traditional methods are not antiquated,
nor are poets necessarily the atavisms which they seem. Thus poets
may be retained as friends of this religion of doubt, but the poet's
true and lasting relation to literature and life is that of the abstract
mathematician to science and life. As the little world of abstract
mathematicians is set a-quiver by some young Frenchman's deduc-
tions on the functions of imaginary values-worthless to applied
science of the day-so is the smaller world of serious poets set a-quiver
by some new subtlety of cadence. Why?
A certain man named Plarr and another man whose name I have
forgotten, some years since, developed the functions of a certain
obscure sort of equation, for no cause save their own pleasure
in the work. The applied science of their day had no use for the
361

THE ART OF POETRY
deductions, a few sheets of paper covered with arbitrary symbols—
without which we should have no wireless telegraph.
What the analytical geometer does for space and form, the poet does
for the states of consciousness. Let us therefore consider the nature of
the formulae of analytics.
By the signs a*+-b* = c*, Limply the circle. By (a-r)? + (b—r)* =
(c-r)*, | imply the circle and its mode of birth. I am led from the
consideration of the particular circles formed by my ink-well and my
table-rim, to the contemplation of the circle absolute, its law; the
circle free in all space, unbounded, loosed from the accidents of time
and place. Is the formula nothing, or is it cabala and the sign of
unintelligible magic? The engineer, understanding and translating to
the many, builds for the uninitiated bridges and devices. He speaks
their language. For the initiated the signs are a door into eternity and
into the boundless ether.
As the abstract mathematician is to science so is the poet to the
world’s consciousness, Neither has direct contact with the many,
neither of them is superhuman or arrives at his utility through occult
and inexplicable ways. Both are scientifically demonstrable.
362

The Approach to Paris
VILDRAC!
t is a silly thing to give people labels, and Iam, I dare say, no more
fortunate in conferring the title of Unanimist on M. Vildrac than
was Georges Duhamel in calling his chapters ‘Jules Romains et les
dieux’, and ‘Charles Vildrac et les hommes’. No one who has read
‘Un Etre en Marche’ would say that M. Romains is less interested in
humanity than is his friend. |do not know whether M. Vildrac sub-
scribes to the unanimist ‘religion’. Or perhaps no cult has ever more
than one member. Vildrac’s ‘Gloire’ might, at first sight, seem a sort
of counterblast to the ‘Ode a la foule qui est ici’. M. Romains flows
into his crowd, or at least he would have us believe so. The subject of
M. Vildrac’s poem is of the Nietzschean, pre-unanimist type. He tries
to impress his personality on the crowd and is disillusioned.
The poems are in contrast, not in contradiction, and they make
interesting comparison,
The ‘Ode to the crowd here present’ begins roughly as follows:
O crowd, you are here in the hollow of the theatre
Docile to the walls, moulding your flesh to the shell,
And your black ranks go from me as a reflux.
You exist.
This light where I am, is yours.
The city is outside, quite near, but you no longer hear it;
In vain will she make large the rumour of her streets
To beat against your walls and to wish your death;
You will not hear it, you will be full
Of your own peculiar silence and of my voice.
He feels the warmth of the crowd, he feels the focus of eyes.
Je ne vois pas si sa prunelle est noire ou bleue;
Mais je sens qu’il me touche;
He becomes the ‘crater’ or vortex.
Ecoute; Little by little the voice issues from my flesh-
And seeks you-and trembles-and you tremble.
1 From ‘The Approach to Paris’ IV,
The New Age, 25 September 1913.
363

THE ART OF POETRY
The voice is within the crowd ‘invasion and victory’ the crowd must
th ink his words:
Ils pénétrent en rangs dans les tetés penchées,
Ils s‘installent brutalement, ils sont les maitres;
Ils poussent, ils bousculent, ils jettent dehors
Lime qui s'y logeait comme une vieille en pleurs.
All the meditations of these people here,
The pain they have carried for years,
The sorrow born yesterday, still increasing, and the grief
That they do not speak of, of which they will not speak.
That sorrow that gives them tears to drink in the evening,
And even that desire which dries their lips,
Is over. Is needless. I do not will it. I drive it out.
Crowd, your whole soul is upright in my flesh,
A force of steel, whereof I hold the two ends
Pierces your mass, and bends it.
Ta forme est moi. Tes gradins et tes galeries,
C'est moi qui les empoigne ensemble et qui les plie,
Comme un paquet de souples jones, sur mon genou.
Do not defend yourself crowd-woman,
Soon you will die, beneath the feet of your hours,
Men, unbound, will flow away through the doors,
The nails of darkness will tear you apart.
What of it,
You are mine before death,
As for the bodies here,
let the city take them!
They will keep upon their foreheads the ashen cross,
Your sign, god that you are for the moment.
Such, in rough outline, is the ‘Ode a la foule qui est ici’. I have natur-
ally Lost all semblance of the original sweep and of the original sound,
partly because the translation rights are reserved and there is not time
to write for permission to break them, partly because I do not wish to
interpose a pretentious translation between the reader and the easily
obtainable original.
M. Vildrac’s poem begins almost as if in antistrophe.

THE APPROACH TO PARIS
GLOIRE
He had been able to gain to him
Many men together
With a cry that they all loved to hear
With a high deed whereof they spoke together.
There was a scrap of the world
Where they knew his life
His acts and his face.
He stood up before the crowd
And knew the drunkenness
Of feeling them submissive to his speech
As wheat-blades are to the wind.
* *
And his happiness was to believe
That, when he left the crowd,
Each one of these men loved him
And that his presence lasted
Innumerable and strong among them
As, in brands dispersed,
The gift and mark of the fire.
Or un jour il en suivit un
Qui retournait s’chez soi, tout seul;
Et il vit son regard s’éteindre
Dés qu'il fut un peu loin des autres,
Then he meets a man who remembers him, ‘mais n’avait rien gardé
de lui dans son esprit ni dans son coeur’, and then he sees 2 crowd
under the influence of a charlatan.
Then he knew that he had conquered too much
And too little.
That to make a crowd-soul
Each man lends for an instant
But the surface of his own.
He had reigned over a people-
As a reflection on water;
As a flame of alcohol
Which takes no grip,
Which burns what it strokes
Without warming.
Then he begins to take men one at a time.
En demeurant et devisant avec chacun
Quand ils étaient bien eux, quand ils étaient bien seuls.
365

THE ART OF POETRY
However far these compositions may be from ‘poetry’ it cannot be
denied that they contain poetical lines, and the latter poem is con-
venient to quote asit gives us, I think, a fair clue to M. Vildrac’s attitude.
M. Vildrac is, I dare say, over prone to imaginative reason, still it is
not my intention to discuss the shortcomings of contemporary French
authors, but to tell what virtues and what matters of interest I have
found in their works. If M. Vildrac were merely a writer with a philo-
sophy of life slightly different from that of M. Romains I would not
trouble to read him, but M. Vildrac is an artist. He is at his best, I
think, in short narrative sketches such as ‘Visite’ and ‘Une Auberge’
(both in ‘Livre d'Amour’, published by E. Figuiére, 7, Rue Corneille).
‘Visite’ has been often quoted and, I believe, translated, but as I have
not the translation by me, I give a rough prose version of my own,
printing, where convenient, line for line a the original.
VISITE
He was seated before his table,
His dreams indolently marked out
Within the domain of his lamp
And he heard against his window
The fragile attacks of the snow.
And suddenly he thought
Of a man whom he knew
And whom he had not seen for a long time,
And he felt an oppression in his throat,
Part sadness and part chagrin,
He knew that this man was without pride
Either in heart or in word
And that he was without charm
Living like the trees
Isolated, on a barren plain;
He knew that for months
He had been promising this man
To visit him,
And that the other
Had thanked him gently for each one of these promises
And had preterided to believe it.
He goes out through the snow to pay the long-deferred visit. After
the first words, when he had come into the light and sat down,
between this man and his companion, both surprised and ‘empressés*
—however you want to translate it, Eager.
Il s‘apergut qu‘on lui ménageait.
366

THE APPROACH TO PARIS
(Another untranslatable word, I suppose we might say, “He felt that
they were beating about the bush.”)
These silences full of questions
Like the white that one leaves
In a design of writing—
He noted upon their faces
A furtive inquietude
He thought, and then understood it.
These people did not believe
That he had come without forethought
So late, from such distance, through the snow
Merely for his pleasure and theirs,
Merely to keep his promise:
And both of them were waiting
Until he should disclose, of a sudden,
The real cause of his visit,
They were anxious to know
What fortune he brought
Or what service he wished of them.
He wished to speak all at once.
He wished to undeceive them but
He was thus separated from them
Until the long delayed moment
When he rose to go.
Then there was a ‘detente’ (literally a discharge as of a pistol).
Then they ventured to understand
He had come for them!
Someone had wanted to see them,
Just that, to see them, to be in their house,
To talk with them and to listen,
And this desire had been
Stranger than the cold and than the snow!
In short, someone had come.
Their eyes were gay now,
And tender
They spoke very quickly
And both together
Trying to keep him.
They stood up before him
Betraying a childish need
Of skipping and clapping their hands ...
367

THE ART OF POETRY
He promised to come again.
But before reaching the door
He set clearly in his memory
The place that bordered their lives,
He looked carefully at each object
Then at the man and woman also,
Such fear did he have at the bottom of his heart
That he would never come back.
I have been told that this is sentiment and therefore damned. I am
not concerned with that argument. I dare say the poem makes a poor
showing in this rough and hurried translation; the point is that
M. Vildrac has told a short story in verse with about one fifth of the
words that a good writer of short stories would have needed for the
narrative. He has conveyed his atmosphere, and his people, and the
event. He has brought narrative verse into competition with narrative
prose without giving us long stanzas of bombast.
You may make whatever objection you like to genre painting. My
only question is: would it be possible to improve on M. Vildrac’s
treatment of the given situation?
M. Vildrac had given us a more serious story in ‘Une Auberge’, I
think he has written two lines too many; I mean the last two lines of
~ poem; but he has achieved here some of his finest effects, in such
Nes as:
Mais comme il avait l'air cependant d’étre des nétres!
The poem begins:
C’est une auberge qu'il y a
Au carrefour des Chétives-Maisons,
Dans le pays od il fait toujours froid.
There are three houses there:
Et la troisiéme est cette auberge au coeur si triste
C'est seulement parce qu’on a soif qu'on entre y boire,
Et l‘on n'est pas forcé d'y raconter son histoire.
A work-wrecked man drifts in, leans heavily on the table.
Il mange lentement son pain
Parce que ses dents sont usées,
Quand il a fini
Tl hésite, puis timide
Va s'asseoir un peu
A cété du feu.

THE APPROACH TO PARIS
He sits there all in a heap, until a child comes in
Et voila qu'elle approche tout doucement
Et vient appuyer sur la main de l‘homme
La chair enfantine de sa bouche;
Et puis léve vers lui ses yeux pleins d’eau
Et lui tend de tout son fréle cor
Une pauvre petite fleur d‘hiver qu'elle a,
Et voila que l'homme sanglote . . .
Then the drab woman at the counter begins her narrative:
Il est venu un homme ici qui n’était pas des nótres.
Il n’était pas vieux comme nous, de misére et de peine,
Il était comme sont sans doute les fils des reines.
Mais comme il avait l‘air cependant d‘être des notres!
Et quand il s‘est levé, a fallu que je pleure
Tellement il ressemblait è celui de mes seize ans …
Il ouvrait déja la porte
Pour retourner dans le vent
Mais quand il apprit pourquoi
Me venaient des larmes.
il Ja renferma, la porte.
... malgré sa jeunesse et malgré mon lit si froid,
Malgré mes seins vidés et mes épaules si creuses,
To some these very simple tales of M. Vildrac will mean a great deal,
and to others they will mean very little. If a person of this latter sort
dislikes the choice of subject he may do worse than to consider the
method of narration. Mr. D. H. Lawrence can do, I dare say, as well,
but M. Vildrac’s stories are different; they are, I think, quite his own.
As to the method of verse, if the reader's ear be so constituted that
he derives no satisfaction from the sound of
Ft il vit son regard s'éteindre
Dès qu'il fut un peu loin des autres.
One cannot teach him by theory to derive satisfaction from this
passage, or from the assonance of ensemble and entendre, drawn at
the end of their lines, or from half a hundred finer and less obvious
matters of sound.
Ido not think that the public is under any moral obligation to take
interest in such affairs.
If the gentle reader wishes to
Crush the something drops of pleasure
From the something grapes of pain.
369

THE ART OF POETRY
It is certainly no concern of mine. I, personally, happen to be tired
of verses which are left full of blank spaces for interchangeable adjec-
tives. In the more or less related systems of versification which have
been adopted by Romains, Chenneviére, Vildrac, Duhamel, and their
friends, 1 do not find such an excessive allowance of blank spaces, and
this seems to me a healthy tendency.
If the gentle reader still enjoys reading or writing such ‘amorous
twins’ as mountain and fountain, mother and brother, him and
forests dim, God forbid that I should interfere with his delights.
Ifa man wants his jokes in ‘Punch’ and his rhymes where he expects
them it is no affair of mine. God forbid that I should exhort any man
to satisfactions of the senses finer than those for which nature has
designed him.
I am aware that there are resolutions of sound less obvious than
rhyme. It requires more pains and intelligence both to make and to
hear them. To demand rhyme is almost like saying that only one note
out of ten need be in melody, it is not quite the same. No one would
deny that the final sound of the line is important. No intelligent per—
son would deny that all the accented sounds are important. I cannot
bring myself to believe that even the unstressed syllables should be
wholly neglected.
I cannot believe that one can test the musical qualities of a passage
of verse merely by counting the number of syllables, or even of
stressed syllables, in each line, and by thereafter examining the
terminal sounds.
God, or nature, or the Unanim, or whoever or whatever is respon-
sible or irresponsible for the existence of the race has given to some
men a sense of absolute pitch, and to some a sense of rhythms, and to
some a sense of verbal consonance, and some are colour-blind, and
some are tone-deaf, and some are almost void of intelligence, hence
we are lead to believe that it would be foolish to expect to move the
hearts of all men simultaneously either by perfection of musical
sounds, either articulate or inarticulate, or by an arrangement of
colours or by a sane and sober exposition in wholly logical prose.
Those who are interested in ritual and in the history of invocation
may have been interested in M. De Gourmont's litanies, those who are
interested in a certain purging of the poetic idiom may be interested in
the work of such men as Vildrac and P. J. Jouve.
370

THE APPROACH TO PARIS
CORBIERE*
But all France is not Paris, and if anything were needed to refute these
generalities it could be found in the work of Corbiére. Tristan Cor-
biére is dead, but his work is scarcely known in England, and for all his
having been a contemporary of Verlaine his work can hardly be said
to have been ‘published’ until the ‘nineties, He has left only one book
and this alone would set him apart from ‘the French poets’ and place
him in that very narrow category which contains Villon and Rimbaud.
He was in fact Breton and had about as much affiliation with his
Parisian contemporaries as had J. M, Synge with the London aesthetes.
Because his versification is more English than French, because he
was apparently careless of all versification, I think that his one volume
will lie half open on the tables of all those who open it once. They
said he was careless of style, etcetera! He was as careless of style as a man
of swift mordant speech can afford to be. For the quintessence of style
is precisely that it should be swift and mordant. It is precisely that
a man should not speak at all until he has something (it matters very
little what) to say.
Je voudrais étre alors chien de fille publique
Lécher un peu d’amour qui ne soit pas payé;
Or earlier in the same poem:
Ah si j‘étais un peu compris! Si par pitié
Une femme pouvait me sourire á moitié,
Je lui dirais: oh viens, ange qui me consoles!...
... Et je la conduirais a hospice des folles.
The dots are in the original.
Damne-toi, pure idole! et ris! et chante! et pleure,
Amante! et meurs d'amour! . .. 4 nos moments perdus.
Or again by way of encouragement.
Couronne tes genoux!...
Mais... nous avons la police,
Et quelque chose en nous d'eunuque et de recors.
‘These scraps are from his Parisian gasconadings, but even in Paris
he looked the thing in the eye and was no more minded to bea ‘stand-
pat-er' or to sooth the world or the world-of-letters with flattery than
he would have been to deceive himself about the state of the Channel
1 From ‘The Approach to Paris’, V,
The New Age, 2 October 1913.
371

THE ART OF POETRY
off his native village, the fishing town where his personal appearance
had earned him the nickname ‘an Ankou' Pa corpse).
He ‘stands’, as the phrase is, by his songs of the Breton coast, and the
proper introduction to him is ‘La Rapsode Foraine’, or the song in it,
to St. Anne.
Mère taillée à coups de hache.
Baton des aveugles! Béquille
Des vieilles! Bras des nouveau-nés!
Mère de madame ta fille!
Parente des abandonnés!
Des croix profondes sont tes rides,
Tes cheveux sont blancs comme fils …
Fais venir et conserve en joie
Ceux 4 naitre et ceux qui sont nés.
Et verse, sans que Dieu te voie,
L‘eau de tes yeux sur les damnés!
One garbles it so in quotation and it is much too long to give in full.
The note of the sea is in the sound of his
AU VIEUX ROSCOFF
Trou de filibustiers, vieux nid
A corsaire! …
Dors: tu peux fermer ton Oeil borgne
Ouvert sur le large, et qui lorgne
Les Anglais, depuis trois cent ans, .. .
One has got a long way from that mélange of satin and talcum
powder which we are apt to believe to be French verse. And Corbiére
himself is most capable of defining those qualities of the national
literature which least attract one.
Ne m‘offrez pas un tréne!
A moi tout seul je fris,
Drole, en ma sauce jaune
De chic et de mepris.
Que les bottes vernies
Pleuvent du paradis. …
It was he who called Hugo ‘Garde national épique’ and Lamartine
Inventeur de la farme écrite,
Lacrymatoire d'abonnés!
He is more real than the realists’ because he still recognises that force
of romance which is a quite real and apparently ineradicable part of
372

THE APPROACH TO PARIS
our life, he preceded and thereby escaped that spirit or that school
which was to sentimentalise over ugliness with a more silly sentimen-
tality than the early romanticists had shown toward ‘the beauties of
nature’.
In short, I go on reading him even though I have finished my
article.
I feel at present as if I had found another poet to put on the little
rack with Villon and Heine, with the poets whom one actually reads.
This is, I dare say, an enthusiasm of the moment, a thing of no critical
value. I tell it for what it is worth.
373

Affirmations’
AS FOR IMAGISME
he term ‘Imagisme’ has given rise to a certain amount of dis-
cussion. It has been taken by some to mean Hellenism; by
others the word is used most carelessly, to designate any sort
of poem in vers libre. Having omitted to copyright the word at its birth
I cannot prevent its misuse. I can only say what | meant by the word
when I made it, Moreover, I cannot guarantee that my thoughts about
it will remain absolutely stationary. I spend the greater part of my
time meditating the arts, and I should find this very dull if it were not
possible for me occasionally to solve some corner of the mystery, or,
at least to formulate more clearly my own thoughts as to the nature
of some mystery or equation,
In the second article of this series I pointed out that energy creates
pattern. I gave examples. | would say further that emotional force
gives the image. By this | do not mean that it gives an ‘explanatory
metaphor’; though it might be hard to draw an exact border line
between the two, We have left false metaphor, ornamental metaphor
to the rhetorician. That lies outside this discussion.
Intense emotion causes pattern to arise in the mind-if the mind is
strong enough, Perhaps I should say, not pattern, but pattern-units,
or units of design. (I do not say that intense emotion is the sole possible
cause of such units, I say simply that they can result from it. They may
also result from other sorts of energy.) 1 am using this term ‘pattern-
unit’, because I want to get away from the confusion between ‘pattern’
and ‘applied decoration’, By applied decoration I mean something like
the ‘wall of Troy pattern’. The invention was merely the first curley-
cue, or the first pair of them, The rest is repetition, is copying.
By pattern-unit or vorticist picture | mean the single jet. The differ-
ence between the pattern-unit and the picture is one of complexity.
The pattern-unit is so simple that one can bear having it repeated
several or many times, When it becomes so complex that repeti-
tion would be useless, then it is a picture, an ‘arrangement of
forms’.
Not only does emotion create the ‘pattern-unit’ and the ‘arrange-
ment of forms’, it creates also the Image. The Image can be of two
sorts. It can arise within the mind. It is then ‘subjective’. External
! The New Age, 28 January 1915,
374

AFFIRMATIONS
causes play upon the mind, perhaps; if so, they are drawn into the
mind, fused, transmitted, and emerge in an Image unlike themselves.
Secondly, the Image can be objective, Emotion seizing up some exter-
nal scene or action carries it intact to the mind; and that vortex
purges it of all save the essential or dominant or dramatic qualities,
and it emerges like the external original.
In either case the Image is more than an idea, It is a vortex or cluster
of fused ideas and is endowed with energy. If it does not fulfil these
specifications, it is not what I mean by an Image. It may be a sketch, a
vignette, a criticism, an epigram or anything else you like. It may be
impressionism, it may even be very good prose. By ‘direct treatment’,
one means simply that having got the Image one refrains from hang-
ing it with festoons.
From the Image to Imagisme: Our second contention was that
poetry to be good poetry should be at least as well written as good
prose, This statement would seem almost too self-evident to need any
defence whatsoever. Obviously, if a man has anything to say, the
interest will depend on what he has to say, and not on a faculty for
saying ‘exiguous’ when he means ‘narrow’, or for putting his words
hindside before. Even if his thought be very slight it will not gain by
being swathed in sham lace.
Thirdly, one believes that emotion is an organiser of form, not
merely of visible forms and colours, but also of audible forms. This
basis of music is so familiar that it would seem to need no support.
Poetry is a composition or an ‘organisation’ of words set to ‘music’.
By ‘music’ here we can scarcely mean much more than rhythm and
timbre. The rhythm form is false unless it belong to the particular
creative emotion or energy which it purports to represent, Obviously
one does not discard ‘regular metres’ because they are a ‘difficulty’,
Any ass can say:
‘John Jones stood on the floor. He saw the ceiling’ or decasyllabicly,
‘John Jones who rang the bell at number eight.’
There is no form of platitude which cannot be turned into iambic
pentameter without labour, It is not difficult, if one have learned to
count up to ten, to begin a new line on each eleventh syllable or to
whack each alternate syllable with an ictus,
Emotion also creates patterns of timbre. But one ‘discards rhyme’,
not because one is incapable of rhyming neat, fleet, sweet, meet, treat,
eat, feet, but because there are certain emotions or energies which are
not to be represented by the over-familiar devices or patterns; just as
there are certain ‘arrangements of form’ that cannot be worked into
dados.
Granted, of course, that there is great freedom in pentameter and
that there are a great number of regular and beautifully regular metres
375

THE ART OF POETRY
fit for a number of things, and quite capable of expressing a wide
range of energies or emotions,
The discovery that bad vers libre can be quite as bad as any other sort
of bad verse is by no means modern. Over eleven centuries ago
Rihaku (Li Po) complained that imitators of Kutsugen (Ch’u Yuan)
couldn’t get any underlying rhythm into their vers libre, that they got
“bubbles not waves’.
Yo ba geki tai ha Kai riu to mu giu,
‘Yoyu and Shojo stirred up decayed (enervated) waves. Open
current flows about in bubbles, does not move in wave lengths.’ If a
man has no emotional energy, no impulse, it is of course much easier
to make something which looks like ‘verse’ by reason of having 2
given number of syllables, or even of accents, per line, than for him to
invent a music or rhythm-structure. Hence the prevalence of ‘regular’
metric, Hence also bad vers libre. The only advantage of bad vers libre
is that it is, possibly, more easy to see how bad it is ... but even this
advantage is doubtful.
By bad yerse, whether ‘regular’ or ‘free’, I mean verse which pre-
tends to some emotion which did not assist at its parturition. I mean
also verse made by those who have not sufficient skill to make the
words move in rhythm of the creative emotion. Where the voltage is
so high that it fuses the machinery, one has merely the ‘emotional
man’ not the artist. The best artist is the man whose machinery can
stand the highest voltage. The better the machinery, the more precise,
the stronger, the more exact will be the record of the voltage and of
the various currents which have passed through it.
These are bad expressions if they lead you to think of the artist as
wholly passive, as a mere receiver of impressions. The good artist is
perhaps a good seismograph, but the difference between man and a
machine is that man can in some degree ‘start his machinery going’.
He can, within limits, not only record but create. At least he can move
as a force; he can produce ‘order-giving vibrations’; by which one may
mean merely, he can departmentalise such part of the life-force as
flows through him.
To recapitulate, then, the vosticist position; or at least my position
at the moment is this:
Energy, or emotion, expresses itself in form. Energy, whose pri-
mary manifestation is in pure form, i.e., form as distinct from likeness
or association can only be expressed in painting or sculpture. Its
expression can vary from a ‘wall of Troy pattern’ to Wyndham Lewis’s
‘Timon of Athens’, or a Wadsworth woodblock. Energy expressing
itself in pure sound, i.e., sound as distinct from articulate speech, can
only be expressed in music. When an energy or emotion ‘presents
an image’, this may find adequate expression in words. It is very
probably a waste of energy to express it in any more tangible
376

AFFIRMATIONS
medium. The verbal expression of the image may be reinforced by a
suitable or cognate rhythm-form and by timbre-form. By rhythm-
form and timbre-form I do not mean something which must of neces-
sity have a ‘repeat’ in it, It is certain that a too obvious ‘repeat’ may be
detrimental.
The test of invention lies in the primary figment, that is to say, in
that part of any art which is peculiarly of that art as distinct from ‘the
other arts’. The vorticist maintains that the ‘organising’ or creative—
inventive faculty is the thing that matters; and that the artist having
this faculty is a being infinitely separate from the other type of artist
es merely goes on weaving arabesques out of other men’s ‘units of
‘orm’.
Superficial capability needs no invention whatsoever, but a great
energy has, of necessity, its many attendant inventions.
377

Beddoes and Chronology’
eats, born in 1795, died in 1821; Shelley, three years his senior,
died the year after; Byron’s life extended from 1788 to 1824.
Beddoes is said to have begun “Death's Jest Book, or the Fool's
Tragedy’, at Oxford in 1825. This and the rest of Beddoes’ writings
were almost inaccessible to the public until 1890, when Edmund Gosse
edited Beddoes’ ‘Poetical Works’. For which edition, however many
friendly and unfriendly differences one may have with Mr. Gosse, one
must give due thanks and credit.
Out of Beddoes’ life, work and ‘literary position’ there arise at least
two riddles of interest. One might and does ask why so good a poet
should have remained so long in obscurity; was it due to a quality of
his style; or should a poet choose his birth date with great care: should
a young poet begin just after the death of three men of recognised
genius, and more or less great popularity? One might say with Keats,
Byron and Shelley all dead there was surely plenty of room for a new
poet. Or one might say, ‘No, the public absorbed in the three romantic
deaths of three fascinating young men, and giving to their poetry that
added attention which demise ever demands, would certainly not pa
attention to any new writer. Besides Wordsworth was still alive.’
Perhaps ‘alive’ is scarcely the word one would apply to the ‘lumin-
ary’ of the Lake District. Wordsworth drew his first orderly and deliber-
ate breath in 1770, and continued the alternate processes of inhalation
and exhalation until 1850. Coleridge and Lamb survived until 1834.
Landor lived from 1775 until 1864. But he was too unpopular to have
obscured any young man’s chance with the public. Blake died in 1827,
So on the whole we must say that Beddoes’ ‘position’ can not be very
well explained by chronology, People say, "There was atime when there
was only Beddoes.’ But it seems difficult to place this exact period.
Beddoes was born in 1803, and Tennyson six years later, Browning in
1812; if Browning waited for recognition, it is equally certain that
Tennyson did not wait very long. So that chronologically Beddoes had
neither especially good nor bad luck, and bare dates will not explain
him one way or the other.
He is perhaps more ‘Elizabethan’ than any so modern poet, that is,
if by being ‘Elizabethan’ we mean using an extensive and Elizabethan
vocabulary full of odd and spectacular phrases: very often quite fine
ones. Lamb had rediscovered old plays, Keats and Shelley had imitated
2 The Future, September 1917.
378

BEDDOES AND CHRONOLOGY
the period. There was nothing unusual or original in picking this sort
of speech as a model. But Beddoes did the thing very well:
*Athulf: A fair and bright assembly: never strode
Old arched Grussau over such a tide
Of helmed chivalry, as when to-day
Our tourney swept, leaping billow-like,
Its palace-banked streets. Knights shut in steel,
Whose shields, like water, glassed the soul-eyed maidens,
That softly did attend their armed tread,
Flower-cinctured on the temples, whence gushed down
A full libation of star-numbered tresses,
Hallowing the neck unto love's silent kiss,
Veiling its innocent white: and then came squires,
And those who bore war's silken tapestries,
And chequered heralds: “twas a human river,
Brimful and beating as if the great god,
Who lay beneath it, would arise. So sways
Time’s sea, which Age snows into and makes deep,
When, from the rocky side of the dim future,
Leaps into it a mighty destiny,
Whose being to endow great souls have been
Centuries hoarded, and the world meanwhile
Sate like a beggar upon Heaven's threshold,
Muttering its wrongs.’
It is quite possible to carp at this passage. Its opening is possibly too
‘descriptive’. Current taste may call the end rhetoric. Still it is magnifi-
cent rhetoric, and it is only of recent years that people have taken
exception to this paraphernalia of Romanticism. Certainly neither
Hugo nor Swinburne would have thought this a fault of our author.
If he is ‘tapestry rather than painting’, surely the pre-Raphaelites
loaded with their own mediaevalism, would not have minded this.
But can these charges be made against the following passage:
‘No more of friendship here; the world is open:
I wish you life and merriment enough
From wealth and wine, and all the dingy glory
Fame doth reward those with, whose love-spurned hearts
Hunger for goblin immortality.
Live long, grow old, and honour crown thy hairs,
When they are pale and frosty as thy heart.
Away. I have no better blessing for thee.”
Very well, says the opponent in my head, but this is ‘Romanti-
cism’, there is nothing Elizabethan about it.
379

THE ART OF POETRY
‘The swallow leaves her nest,
The soul my weary breast;
But therefore let the rain
On my grave
Fall pure; for why complain?
Since both will come again
O’er the wave.’
At any rate this strophe is lyric. Prose comes into the play.
‘Isbrand: Dead and gone! a scurvey burthen to this ballad of life.
There lies he, Siegfried; my brother, mark you; and I weep not, nor
gnash the teeth, nor curse: and why not, Siegfried? Do you see this?
So should every honest man be; cold, dead, and leaden-coffined.
This was one who would be constant in friendship, and the pole
wanders: one who would be immortal, and the light that shines upon
his pale forehead now, through yonder gewgaw window, undulated
from its star hundreds of years ago. That is constancy, that is life. O
moral nature!”
This passage foregoing is not out of key with Leopardi. And it were
perhaps academic to carp at the few unneeded words in the following:
'I do begin to feel
As if | were a ghost among the men,
As all, whom I loved, are; for their affections
Hung on things new, young, and unknown to me,
And that I am is but the obstinate will
Of this my hostile body.’
I try to set out his beauties without much comment, leaving the
reader to judge, for 1 write of a poet who greatly moved me at eigh-
teen, and for whom my admiration has diminished without dis-
appearing. I have a perfectly definite theory as to why my admiration
has waned, but I would rather the reader came to his own conclusion.
The critic should never be wholly governed by his stylistic beliefs, nor
should the layman always think the critic is calling a substance brass,
when he, the critic, is only attempting to define gold that is not quite
24 carat. This next speech is simpler syntactically:
‘Tremble not, fear me not
The dead are ever good and innocent,
And love the living, They are cheerful creatures,
And quiet as the sunbeams, and most like
In grace and patient love and spotless beauty,
The new-born of mankind. ’Tis better too
To die, as thou art, young, in the first grace
And full of beauty, and so be remembered
380

BEDDOES AND CHRONOLOGY
As one chosen from the earth to be an angel;
Not left to droop and wither, and be borne
Down by the breath of time.”
The pomps of poetry are at his disposal, but a phrase like-
‘the sea’s wide leafless wind"
is perhaps too fine to be dismissed as one of them.
The patter of his fools is certainly the best tour de force of its kind since
the Elizabethan patter it imitates:
‘The dry rot of oe hath eaten the ship of fools to dust; she is
no more seaworthy, The world will see its ears in a glass no longer;
so we are laid aside and shall soon be forgotten; for why should the
feast of asses come but once a year, when all days are foaled of one
mother? O world, world! The gods and fairies left thee, for thou wert
too wise, and now, thou Socratic star, thy demon, the Great Pan,
Folly, is parting from thee. The oracles still talked in their sleep, shall
our grand-children say, till Master Merriman’s kingdom was broken
up: now is every man his own fool, and the world’s sign is taken down.’
‘Farewell thou great-eared mind.’
‘My jests are cracked, my coxcomb fallen, my bauble confiscated, my
cap decapitated. Toll the bell; for oh, for oh! Jack Pudding is no more.’
‘I will yield Death the crown of folly. He hath no hair, and in this
weather might catch cold and die.”
For all this briskness, and for all the pageantry of his speech, and
number of decorations in which he might seem to have forestalled the
pre-Raphaelites, one speech of the play may well be turned into self-
criticism:
‘and I utter
Shadows of words, like to an ancient ghost,
Arisen out of hoary centuries
Where none can speak his language.’
‘These lines are as beautiful as anything he has written, but they
bring us directly to the question: Can a man write poetry in a purely
archaic dialect? Presumably he can, and Beddoes has done so; but
would not this poetry, his poetry be more effective, would not its
effectiveness be much more lasting if he had used a real speech instead
of a language which may have been used on the early Victorian stage,
but certainly had no existence in the life of his era?
Making all due allowance; granting that he may be as easy to read
as Webster and some of the late Eli: hans, is not this the secret of
his comparative unpopularity? Even grant that he is too macabre to
381

THE ART OF POETRY
suit the ‘wider’ audience which will take nothing but sugary optim-
ism? Grant that he suffers from the samples given in anthologies,
which are always the slight lyrics. His best work is in the plays and
dramatic fragments. The song, ‘Old Adam, the Carrion Crow’,
quoted in the Oxford Book, loses a deal of its force if one have not the
introductory lines:
‘Thus, as I heard the snaky mermaids sing
In Phlegethon, that hydrophobic river,
One May-morning in Hell.’
Or even the whole speech:
‘Wolfram: Good melody! If this be a good melody,
I have at home, fattening in my stye,
A sow that grunts above the nightingale.
Why this will serve for those who feed their veins
With crust, and cheese of dandelion‘s milk,
And the pure Rhine. When I am sick o’ mornings,
With a horn spoon tinkling in my porridge-pot,
‘Tis a brave ballad: but in Bacchanal night,
O'er wine, red, black, or purple-bubbling wine,
That takes a man by the brain and whirls him round,
By Bacchus’ lip! I like a full-voiced fellow,
A craggy-throated, fat-checked trumpeter,
A barker, a moon-howler, who could sing
Thus, as I heard, etc. ...’
Still the tragedy and the beauty, for he has both, are in the main
lost in the gaudiness of the words. His plot in “The Fool’s Tragedy’ is
based on the stabbing of a Duke of Munsterberg by his court jester.
Despite the magical element in the play, the passions are great enough
to carry the improbabilities. But they will not quite lift the vocabulary.
On the other hand, so many people who call themselves lovers of
poetry are in reality only lovers of high-sounding words and imposing
verbosity, and to them Beddoes should give very great pleasure, for he
carries these things in poetry, whereas many others who try to display
them do not come anywhere near the seats of the Muses.
Where in Francis Thompson, for example, will you find a page
worth the following?
‘To trust in story,
In the old times Death was a feverish sleep,
In which men walked. The other world was cold
And thinly-peopled, so life's emigrants
Came back to mingle with the crowds of earth:
But now great cities are transplanted thither,
382

BEDDOES AND CHRONOLOGY
Memphis, and Babylon, and either Thebes
And Priam’s towery town with its one beech,
The dead are most and merriest: so be sure
There will be no more haunting, till their towns
Are full to the garret; then they'll shut their gates,
To keep the living out, and perhaps leave
A dead or two between both kingdoms.’

Landor (1775-1864)
ur poetry and our prose have suffered incalculably whenever
we have cut ourselves off from the French. All that we most
hate in the Victorian era is due to an interruption of the
current; the Napoleonic wars occurring just when French eighteenth-
century culture should, by rights, have been infiltering through the
English; and this loss has scarce been made good. Such losses are
perhaps never made good,
Our prose is only just taking count of the existence of Stendhal and
Flaubert. On the other hand, one must not exaggerate. The exchange
between the two countries is not wholly uneven. England, to her
glory, was not always dowdy Victorian, Voltaire was indebted to
English philosophers, and if we reach back to Fielding we find a prose
author worthy of any continental tradition; or, receding further,
Burton of the ‘Anatomy’ can perhaps hold his own against the robust
phrasing of Brantome.
The Eighteen Nineties in England were doing very much what
Gautier had been doing in France in the Eighteen Thirties, and there is
a fineness in Gautier’s later work for which one will seek in vain
among the English poets succeeding, They might indeed have learned
it from Gautier; or they might have learned it from Landor, but this
latter study would have been almost as heretical as the former, The
Victorian cult of the innocuous so distressingly interposed itself. One
is tired of hearing depreciation of Tennyson, but he is a very conven-
ient example. The ‘Spectatorial’ mind, whether in press or in school-
room, has recommended ‘safe’ poets. Mr. Wordsworth, a stupid man,
with a decided gift for portraying nature in vignettes, never yet ruined
anyone’s morals, unless, perhaps, he has driven some susceptible
persons to crime in a very fury of boredom. Milton, because at a
convenient time he utilised a then popular phase of religion, has long
rs ig a reputation based only in small part on his actual poetic
value,
Landor, a republican, at a time when such politics were more
suspect than syndicalism is at present, was carefully edged out of the
way. In his dialogue on the Chinese Emperor, the little children of the
palace oppose their simple arithmetic to the western doctrine of the
Trinity, Landor has not been a popular author.
His collected works are nevertheless the best substitute for a Univer-
* The Future, November 1917,
384

LANDOR (1775-1864)
sity education that can be offered to any man ina hurry. His fame is by
no means the ‘faultless fame’ of Swinburne’s poem in memorial of
him. He is a very uneven author; but there is no difficulty in knowing
what Swinburne had in mind when he, in his first youth, wrote those
verses, for Gautier himself has never given to the world a more
chiselled marmorean quatrain than Landor's:
Past ruin’d Ilion Helen lives,
Alcestis rises from the shades ;
Verse calls them forth ; "tis verse that gives
Immortal youth to mortal maids,
It was typical that Landor should have inserted an address ‘To
General Andrew Jackson, President of the United States,’ at the begin—
ning of the second volume of ‘Pericles and Aspasia’ (edition of 1842).
The poem, almost needless to say, has nothing whatever to do with
‘Pericles and Aspasia’. There are those who have no middle ground in
the mind, Landor was conceivably of them, now writing the perfect
and incomparable sentence, and now tumbling into most utter
incongruity.
We have had so many translations marked only by a clumsy approxi-
mation to certain Greek and Latin grammatic idioms that one may
perhaps open with prejudice even the classical dialogues in the
‘Imaginary Conversations’. The vocative case, and second person
singular of the pronoun, intrude even in the almost wers libre of the
Peleus and Thetis (spoken in ‘Epicurus, Leontion and Ternissa’):
PELEUS: “Goddess! to me, to thy Peleus, Oh how far more than god-
dess! why then this sudden silence? why these tears? The last we
shed were when the Fates divided us, saying the earth was not
thine, and the brother of Zeus, he the alee of waters, had called
thee. Those that fall between the beloved at parting are bitter, and
ought to be: woe to him who wishes they were not! but these that
flow again at the returning light of the blessed feet should be
refreshing and divine as morn.
TERNISSA (as THETIS): ‘Support me, support me in thine arms, once
more, once only, Lower not thy shoulder from my cheek, to gaze at
those features that (in times past) so pleased thee. The sky is serene;
the heavens frown not on us: do they prepare for us fresh sorrow?
Prepare for us! ah me! the word of Zeus is spoken: our Achilles is
discovered; he is borne away in the black hollow ships of Aulis, and
would have flown faster than they sail, to Troy.
‘Surely there are those among the gods, or among the goddesses,
who might have forwarned me: and they did not! Were there no
omens, no auguries, no dreams, to shake thee from thy security?
no priest to prophesy? And what pastures are more beautiful than
385

THE ART OF POETRY
Larissa's? what victims more stately? Could the soothsayers turn
aside their eyes from these?
reLeus: ‘Approach with me and touch the altar, O my beloved! Doth
not thy finger now impress the soft embers of incense? how often
hath it burned, for him, for thee! And the lowings of the herds are
audible for their leaders, from the sources of Apidanus and Enipeus
to the sea-beach. They may yet prevail.’
Tuetis: ‘Alas! alas! Priests can foretell but not avert the future; and
all they can give us are vain promises and abiding fears.’
I do not know whether Landor first wrote the dialogue in this
curious mixture of broken verses turning now and again into prose,
and then later put it into regular metre, without improving it; or
whether being unsatisfied with his ‘regular’ verse he re-wrote the
passages in this rhythmically interesting agglomerate. In it Peleus
mentions old age, as if it might also befall the immortal Thetis, and
then breaks off:
‘Had I forgotten thy divinity? forgotten it in thy beauty? Other
mortals think their beloved partake of it then mostly when they are
gazing on their charms; but thy tenderness is more than godlike;
and never have I known, never have I wished to know, whether
aught in our inferior nature may resemble it.
THETIS: “A mortal so immutable! the Powers above are less.
PELEUS: “Time without grief would not have greatly changed me,
THETIS: 'There is a loveliness which youth may be without, and which
the gods want. To the voice of compassion not a shell in all the ocean
is attuned; and no tear ever dropped from Olympus. ...’
‘Classicism’ in English, or shall we say “Greekism and Latinism’ have
moved by clearly marked stages, There is perhaps a good deal of Ovid
in Chaucer. Gavin Douglas improved perhaps upon Virgil whenever
the text touches the sea or the elements. He is perhaps never Virgilian,
Chapman retained a great deal of the ‘surge and thunder’, but it is
extremely difficult to read more than a few pages of him at a sitting,
It is possible that certain lines and passages in Marlowe's Ovidian
Elegies are the first which successfully render in English the exact tone
of the original. The eighteenth and late seventeenth centuries put the
classics into silk stockings.
I find in a rather rare book of criticism, published in 1885, some
remarks on the poet's ‘power of looking out of his own age, and of
reaching the standpoint of another’. The author of this book says that
Shelley seemed to have had a foretaste of it. He then states that with
Tennyson, Browning and Arnold, English poetry entered a new phase:
“We could not say of the English poets, before these, that they had
been interpreters of any age but their own,’
386

LANDOR (1775-1864)
Surely all this glory is Landor’s. Surely no man has ever interpreted
more different eras with sureness and thoroughness, whether it be in
‘Pericles and Aspasia’, or his dialogues between Chaucer, Petrarch and
Boccaccio, or in the Normanby dialogue, which is contemporary and
almost a novel.
Surely also this statement in 1885 is typical of the way Landor is
overlooked; he is not even mentioned in the essay,
The critic, an admirer of Mathew Arnold’s, may defend the letter
of his statement by saying that Landor, though a poet, did most of his
‘interpretation’ in prose. But it is almost incredible that Landor should
not even be mentioned. There is no need of opening the quibble over
the ‘border line’. Indubitably Landor never gave so complete a verse
interpretation as ‘The Ring and the Book’. There are, indeed, too
many absolutely unanswerable questions aroused by any attempt to
compare these two writers. Browning in verse is presumably the better
poet; largely perhaps because Landor never learned to write a long
passage of verse without in some way clogging and blocking the
reader's attention. Yet Browning must constantly have envied him his
perfect lines, his perfect commencements:
Tanagra! think not I forget
Thy beautifully-storied streets ;
Be sure my memory bathes yet
In clear Thermodon, and yet greets
The blythe and liberal shepherd-boy,
Whose sunny bosom swells with joy
When we accept his matted rushes
Upheav'd with sylvan fruit; away he bounds, and blushes.
How incomparable if it had stopped at ‘Thermodon’; how fine we
should think him if we had found the three and a half opening lines
cut in a fragment of stone! How utterly it goes to pieces when we
come upon “The blythe and liberal shepherd-boy’! And how ‘Brown-
ingesque’ it turns with the ‘matted rushes’!
Landor‘s second strophe continues:
I promise to bring back with me
What thou with transport wilt receive,
The only proper gift for thee,
Of which no mortal shall bereave
In later times thy mouldering walls,
Until the last old turret falls ;
A crown, a crown from Athens won,
A crown no God can wear, beside Latona’s son.
Questions crop up as fast as one transcribes the quotation: Why is
there so much more to be said for ‘Latona’s son’ than for ‘Apollo’ in
387

THE ART OF POETRY
just this particular line; why is the effect of finish so given, by this
utterly useless bit of mythical genealogy? And the ‘Browningism’ in
the former strophe, the particularisation which makes Landor’s later
work so much better than his early poems: does it come from the
elder man or from the younger?
And Landor himself, the first useful critic, or the first analytical
critic in English; the first man to go through an English poem line by
line marking what was good, what was poor, what was excessive; the
first person seriously to consider and write down this, almost the only,
sort of criticism that can profit a later writer; can we put down any
satisfactory comment on his ten volumes without taking at least two
volumes to do it int

Prefatio Aut Cimicium Tumulus*
r, F, V. Morley, with a misplaced sense of humour, has
suggested that I write a fifty page preface to two hundred
pages of contemporary poesy. This to me, who have for a
quarter of a century contended that critics should know more and
write less. No two hundred pages of contemporary poetry would
sustain the demands I could make in half such a preface. l am more—
over confining my selection to poems Britain has not accepted and in
the main that the British literary bureaucracy does Nor want to have
printed in England.
I shall therefore write a preface mainly about something else.
Mr. Eliot and I are in agreement, or ‘belong to the same school of
critics’, in so far as we both believe that existing works form a complete
order which is changed by the introduction of the ‘really new’ work.
His contempt for his readers has always been much greater than
mine, by which I would indicate that I quite often write as if lexpected
my reader to use his intelligence, and count on its being fairly strong,
whereas Mr. Eliot after'enduring decennial fogs in Britain practically
always writes as if for very very feeble and brittle mentalities, from
whom he can expect neither resilience nor any faculty for seeing the
import instead of the details or surfaces,
When he talks of ‘commentation and elucidation’ and of the “cor-
rection of taste’, | go into opposition, or rather, having been there
first, I note that if I was in any sense the revolution I have been fol-
lowed by the counter-revolution. Damn your taste, 1 would like if
possible to sharpen your perceptions, after which your taste can take
care of itself,
‘Commentation’ be damned. ‘Elucidation’ can stand if it means
‘turn a searchlight on’ something or preferably some work or author
lying in shadow.
Mr. Eliot’s flattering obeisance to ‘exponents of criticism’, wherein he
says that he supposes they have not assumed that criticism is an
‘autotelic activity’, seems to me so much apple-sauce. In so far as the
bureaucracy of letters has considered their writing as anything more
than a short cut to the feeding trough or a means of puffing up their
personal importances, they have done little else for the past thirty
years than boost the production of writing about writing, not only as
+ From Active Anthology (1933); Polite Essays (New Directions, 1940).
389

THE ART OF POETRY
autotelic, but as something which ought to receive more attention
from the reading victim than the great books themselves.
Granted that nobody ought to be such a presumptuous imbecile as
to hold up the autotelic false horizon, Mr. Eliot describes a terrestrial
paradise and not the de facto world, in which more immediate locus we
observe a perpetual exchange of civilities between pulex, cimex,
vermiformis, etc., each holding up his candle before the shrines of his
similars,
A process having no conceivable final limit and illustratable by my
present activity: | mean on this very page, engaging your attention
while I talk about Mr. Eliot’s essay about other essayists’ essays. In the
course of his eminently professorial volume he must have mentioned
at least forty-five essayists whom tomorrow's readers will be most
happy not to hear mentioned, but mention of whom must have
contributed enormously to Mr, Eliot's rise to his deserved position as
arbiter of British opinion.
KRINO
‘Existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves.’ It
would be healthier to use a zoological term rather than the word
monument. It is much easier to think of the Odyssey or Le Testament or
Catullus’ Epithalamium as something living than as a series of cenotaphs.
After all, Homer, Villon, Propertius, speak of the world as I know it,
whereas Mr, Tennyson and Dr. Bridges did not. Even Dante and Guido
with their so highly specialised culture speak of a part of life as | know
it. ATIFANATOS.
However, accepting for the moment Mr. Eliot's monumental or
architectural simile: the KRINO, ‘to pick out for oneself, choose, prefer’
(page 381 my edition of Liddell and Scott) which seems to me the
major job, is to determine, first, the main form and main proportions
of that order of extant letters, to locate, first the greater pyramids and
then, possibly, and with a decently proportioned emphasis, to con-
sider the exact measurements of the stone-courses, layers, etc,
Dryden gives T. S. E. a good club wherewith to smack Milton. But
with a modicum of familiarity or even a passing acquaintance with
Dante, the club would hardly be needed.
A volume of quite sound statistical essays on poesy may quite easily
drive a man to the movies, it may express nothing save the most per-
fect judgements and the utmost refinements of descriptivity and
whet, nevertheless, no appetite for the unknown best, or for the best
still unread by the neophyte.
A book 66 per cent concerned with manipulating and with re-
handling the errors of seventy contemporary pestilential describers
390

PREFATIO AUT CIMICIUM TUMULUS
and rehashers of opinion, and only 34 per cent concerned with focus-
ing the reader’s attention on the virtu of books worth reading is, at least
to the present victim, more an annoyance than a source of jocundity.
And if T am to put myself vicariously in the place of the younger
reader or if | am to exercise parental protectiveness over some ima-
gined offspring, I can find myself too angry for those mincing polite-
nesses demanded by secondary editorial orders.
My opinion of critics is that:
The best are those who actually cause an amelioration in the art
which they criticise.
The next best are those who most focus attention on the best that is
written (or painted or composed or cut in stone).
And the pestilential vermin are those who distract attention from the
best, either to the second rate, or to hokum, or to their own critical
writings.
Mr. Eliot probably ranks very high in the first of these three groups,
and deserves badly of us for his entrance into the last.
He uses Dryden legitimately in reducing exaggerated adulation of
Milton, but the fact of his resurrecting Dryden poisons Professor
Taupin, and so on and so on, thence further proceeding.
I don’t at this point mean to criticise Taupin’s Quatres Essais, but they
offer me a fine chance to make an addendum.
Taupin is interesting while writing of Frobenius and Dante. In the
latter case I suspect a Flamand ancestry has saved him from the n.r.f.
dither and wish-wash. There is (naturally?) a let down in the pages
following. I suppose this is due to Taupin’s respect for his elders,
Professor Eliot in a fit of misanthropy dug up Dryden and Taupin
was lured into reading him, The citation from Dryden may have been
cleverly inserted by Taupin, at any rate it acts as a foil for his own
somewhat contorted style to which one returns with relief from
Dryden’s platitude and verbosity. | am unable to determine whether
Taupin is being superlatively astute and counting on the reader ‘seeing
for himself’, or whether he was simply in a hurry, but 30 pages furnish
a magnificent hasis for deduction. Which he refrains from making.
He may have expected the reader to see it for himself.
I know from longer experience than Dr. René’s that there is no use
in expecting the reader to do anything of the sort. (No one has, for
example, ever noticed the ground-plan of my Instigations.)
On page 161 Taupin quotes Condillac: ‘Il y a deux espéces: le talent
et le génie, Celui-la continue les idées d'un art ou d'une science
connue, d’une maniére propre a produire les effets qu'on en doit
391

THE ART OF POETRY
naturellement attendre . . . Celui—ci ajoute au talent l‘idée d‘esprit, en
quelque sort créateur.”
Talent ‘continues the ideas of a known art or science to produce
naturally expectable results’,
On page 164 he quotes Milton: ‘and twilight gray had in her sober
livery all things clad’.
No one can be so ignorant as to suppose this manner of expression is
anything save that of an art known and applied by several dozen drama-
tists. The Shakespearian original or model will instantly spring to the
mind of almost any literate reader.
But the known process is vilely used, It is disgustingly used.
The Shakespearian line contains, | admit, one word not absolutely
essential to the meaning, It is a monosyllable and three of its four
letters serve to concentrate and fulfil the double alliteration preceding.
Anybody but a botcher would have omitted the two useless words
from the Milton, He not only derives but dilutes.
However, Taupin continues (still without heaving rocks at the
victim) on the next page we find:
‘the setting sun..."
Gentlemen, ah wubb-wubb, what did the setting sun do?
‘the setting sun. …
DESCENDED.”
The abject and utter nullity of British criticism in general for over
two centuries is nowhere so squalid and naked as in the fact that
generations of Britons and humble Americans have gone on swallow-
ing this kind of rubbish. (Despite what Landor had shown them in his
notes on Catullus.)
The only camouflage used to put over this idiocy is a gross and
uninteresting rhythm.
The clodhoppers needed only one adverb between the subject and
predicate to hide the underlying stupidity.
Chateaubriand, in a passage subsequently cited, was not, as Taupin seems
to imply, supinely imitating the passage, but possibly trying to correct
it, everything in his description is in place. His paragraph, like most so
called prose poetry, lacks adequate rhythmic vitality and has, con-
sequently, the dullness germane to its category.
MR. ELIOT'S GRIEF
Mr. Eliot’s misfortune was to find himself surrounded by a horrible
and microcephalous bureaucracy which disliked poetry, it might be
392

PREFATIO AUT CIMICIUM TUMULUS
too much to say ‘loathed’ it. But the emotion was as strong as any in
the bureaucratic bosom. Bureaucracy has no loves and is composed
mainly of varied minor dislikes. The members of this bureaucracy, sick
with inferiority complex, had just enough wits to perceive that Eliot
was their superior, but no means of detecting his limits or measuring
him from the outside, and no experience that would enable them to
know the poisons wherewith he had been injected. For that diagnosis
perhaps only a fellow American is qualified, one having suffered an
American University. The American University is or was aware of the
existence of both German and English institutions, being younger and
in a barbarous country, its inferiority complex impelled it to compari-
son and to a wish to equal and surpass, but gave it no immunity from
the academical bacilli, inferiority complex directed against creative
activity in the arts,
That there is a percentage of bunk in the Selected Essays Mr. Eliot will
possibly be the last to deny, but that he had performed a self-analysis
is still doubtful.
This kind of essay assumes the existence of a culture that no longer
subsists and does nothing to prepare a better culture that must or
ought to come into being, I say ‘better’, for the new paideuma will at
least be a live paideuma not a dead one,
Such essays are prepared nor for editors who care about a living
literature or a live tradition, or who even want the best of Eliot's
ception applied to an author of second or third or fourth category
Ὧν ex. Seneca), they want to maintain a system wherein it is possible
to receive fifteen guineas for an article of approximately 3,000—4,000
words, in a series to which Mr. Eliot’s sensitivity and patience will give
lustre and wherein his occasional eminence will shed respectability on
a great mass of inferior writing.
Their mentality is not far from that of a publisher of cheap editions
who occasionally puts in a good book, so that the serious German will
think that the miscellany is intellectual (ipse dicebat), Given the two or
three real books in his series he believes the German highbrow will
buy the rest thinking it the right thing to do.
IN HAPPIER ERA
The study of Latin authors was alive a century and a quarter, perhaps
hardly more than a century ago.
Young men are now lured into colleges and universities largely on
false pretences.
We live in a vile age when it is impossible to get reprints of the few
dozen books that are practically essential to a competent knowledge of
try. When Alexander Moring and Doctor Rouse set out to repub-
lish the books that had been good enough for Shakespeare, the
393

THE ART OF POETRY
enterprise went on the rocks. You can’t get a current edition of Gold-
ing’s Metamorphoses, or of Gavin Douglas, or of Salel; the British grocer
will break a contract for printing Cavalcanti when he would not
dream of breaking a contract for prunes.
In the matter of education, if the young are not to profit by our
sweats, if they are not to pluck the fruits of our experience in the form
of better curricula, it might be well to give it up altogether. At any rate
the critic not aiming at a better curriculum for the serious study of
literature is a critic half-baked, swinging in a vacuum. It would be
hypocrisy to pretend that Eliot's essays are not aimed at professors and
students,
The student is best aided by being able to read and to own conven-
iently the best that has been created.
Yeats, who has always been against the gang and the bureaucracy,
now muddled, now profound, now merely Celtic or erroneously
believing that a free Ireland, or at least a more Oirish Ireland, would
help the matter, long ago prayed for a new sacred book,
Every age has tried to compound sucha volume. Every great culture
has had such a major anthology. Pisistratus, Li Po, the Japanese Em-
peror who reduced the number of Noh dramas to about 450; the
hackneyed Hebrew example; in less degree the Middle Ages, with the
matter of Britain, of France, and of Rome le Grant.
The time to be interested in Seneca may possibly have been before
Mr. Shakespeare had written his plays. But assuming that Mr, Eliot's
plenum exists, the relations of its different components have been
changed in our time; there are most distinctly the movies which bear
on all dramatic construction, and there are Max Ernst’s few volumes
of engravings which have distinctly said their word about the Freudian
novel,
If the past 30 years have a meaning, that meaning is not very appar-
ent in Mr. Eliot's condescensions to the demands of British serial
publication. If it means anything it means a distinct reduction in the
buxk of past literature that the future will carry.
Ishould have no right to attack England's most accurate critic were
it not in the hope of something better, if not in England, at least
somewhere in Space and time.
There is a habit or practice of attacking the lists in How to Read.
Young academes who have not read the works listed say my choice
is capricious, most of them do not stop to see what my lists are
lists or.
I have catalogued the towns in Dorset without mentioning Dur-
ham, I have listed the cities in England and Scotland and omitted
Berwick-on-Tweed. Therefore the assistant professor or the weekly
reviewer is educated, superlatively educated, and I am still impetuus
394

PREFATIO AUT CIMICIUM TUMULUS
juventus, sipping with the bally bee and wholly unscientific in my
methods,
Mr Aldington was perhaps the most vociferous, he vociferised about
forty contradictions of things that I hadn’t said, perhaps out of kind-
ness, thinking it the only way his paper would give the booklet two
columns, perhaps because he fawncied himself as the fine olde nor-
thern rough-haired St. Bernard defending the kittens of Alexandria.
He has always tended to lose his shirt and breeches if one made any
restrictive remarks about Greeks, even though it were only to suggest
that some Greeks wrote better than others,
Ut moveat, ut doceat, ut delectet.
There are at least three kinds of inaccurate statement which might
with advantage be dissociated,
1, The somewhat violent statement conveying a perception (quia
perception it is something perceived by the writer), the inaccuracy of
such statement is often more apparent than real, and as every reader
resists an opinion diverse from his own, such statement is often,
one might say is usually, corrected or more than corrected in
transit.
2. There is the apparently careful statement containing all the
possible, or at least so many, modifications of the main proposition
that the main meaning is either lost in transit or so dampened down
that it has no effect on the reader.
Both these kinds of statement can be justified in various ways
depending on where and why they are used.
3, There is the inaccurate statement that is just simply vague, either
because the writer doesn't kNow or because he is incompetent in
expression.
Such ignorance in successful vendors of their wares to current
publications very often disguises itself as verity No. 2.
Camouflage might be further subdivided:
A. ‘Sound opinion’, i.e. restating accepted opinion without any
direct or personal knowledge.
B. Covering this ignorance either with restrictive clauses, or scintil-
lating with paradox.
There is gongorism in critical writing as well as in bad poetry. You
might say that discussion of books ceases to be critical writing and
becomes just the functioning of bureaucracy when the MAIN END
(telos) is forgotten.
As we cannot educate our grandfathers, one supposes that critical
writing is committed for the purpose of educating our offspring, our
contemporaries, or ourselves, and that the least a critic can do is to be
aware of the present even if he be too swinish to consider the future.
395

THE ART OF POETRY
The critic is either a parasite or he is concerned with the growth of
the next paideuma.
Marinetti is thoroughly simputico, Writing and orating ut moveat, he has
made demands that no one considers in their strict literal sense, but
which have, and have had, a definite scope.
‘An early play of no merit whatever’, ‘the brain of a fourth-rate
playwright’ as matters of an highly specialised clinic may conceivably
have something to do with critical standards. The impression is that
their importance must be limited to some very minor philological
field, Their import for tomorrow’s paideuma is probably slight.
As specialist and practising writer one might want to know whether
Seneca wrote any other lines as effective as
Per alta vada spatia sublimi aethere
testare nullos esse, qua veheris, deos.
Mr. Eliot can think of no other play which reserves such a shock
for the last word. (Ref. or cf. O. Henry's stories, bell in the last
pages.)
The only trouble with the citation is that it is a bit ambiguous;
Mr. Eliot and Professor Miller disagreeing as to its theological import,
Mr. Eliot inclining to the Christian interpretation, or what Seneca
ought to have meant. No, I mustn’t exaggerate. Seneca is not being
Christian. Mr, Eliot votes against a sweeping atheistical meaning. 1
can’t personally see that the old half-bore goes further than asserting
that the gods are not in that particular district of the aether. If there is
anything about justice, it must be in the context, not in the two lines
quoted.
In the present decomposition and under the yoke of the present
bureaucracy it would probably be too much to demand that before
discussing an author a reviewer answer the following questions:
1. Have you read the original text of the author under discussion?
or how much of it have you read?
2, Is it worth reading? or how much of it is worth reading? and by
whom?
As for Elizabethan dramedy, Lamb and Hazlitt are supposed to have
set the fad, but Lamb at any rate did pick out a volume of selections;
showing what he thought might be the basis of an interest.
The proportion between discussion and the exhibits the discusser
dares show his reader is possibly a good, and probably a necessary, test
of his purpose. In a matter of degree, I am for say 80 per cent exhibit
and 20 per cent yatter.
Mr. Eliot and Miss Moore are definitely fighting against an impover-
ishment of culture, against a paucity of reading programme. Neither
396

PREFATIO AUT CIMICIUM TUMULUS
they nor anyone else is likely to claim that they have as much interest
in life as I have, or that I have their patience in reading,
That does not make it any less necessary to distinguish between
Eliot registering his belief re a value, and Eliot ceding to the bad,
not to say putrid habits of the bureaucracy which has surrounded
him.
As alarmist, as capricious, perverse, etc., I repeat that you cannot
get the whole cargo of a sinking paideuma on to the lifeboat. If you
propose to have any live literature of the past kept in circulation,
available (flat materialism) in print at prices the eager reader can
pay, there has got to be more attention to the best and to the
basic. Once that is established you can divagate into marginalia,
but the challenge will be more incisive and the criteria will be more
rigorous.
In citing the Miltonic burble I am merely on my way towards a
further assertion.
The critical sense shows more in composition than in a critical
essay.
The unwelcome and disparate authors whom I have gathered in this
volume have mostly accepted certain criteria which duller wits have
avoided.
They have mostly, if not accepted, at any rate faced the demands,
and considered the works, made and noted in my How to Read. That in
itself is not a certificate of creative ability, but it does imply a freedom
from certain forms of gross error and from certain kinds of bungling
which will indubitably consign many other contemporary writings to
the ash-bin, with more than expected celerity.
Mr. Bunting probably seems reactionary to most of the other
contributors, I think the apparent reaction is a definite endeavour to
emphasise certain necessary elements which the less considering
American experimentors tend to omit. Atany rate Mr. Bunting asserted
that ambition some years ago, but was driven still further into the
American ambience the moment he looked back upon British com-
position of, let us say, 1927-8,
I believe that Britain, in rejecting certain facts (facts, not opinions)
in 1912-15 entered a sterile decade.
Willingness to experiment is not enough, but unwillingness to
experiment is mere death.
If ten pages out of its two hundred and a go into a Corpus
Poetarum of 4.p. 2033, the present volume will amply be justified.
(Yes, | know I have split the future of that verb. Var. will, and amply.)
Ihave not attempted to represent all the new poets, I am leaving the
youngest, possibly some of ὧν brightest, to someone else or to future
effort, not so much from malice or objection to perfect justice, as from
inability to do everything all at once.
397

THE ART OF POETRY
There are probably fifty very bright poems that are not here assem-
bled. I suspect Mr. 5. Putnam has written two or three. Mr. Bridson
is champing on the bit. Someone more in touch with the younger
Americans ought to issue an anthology or a special number of some
periodical, selected with criteria, either his or mine.
The assertion implicit in this volume is that after ten or twenty
years of serious effort you can consider a writer uninteresting, but
the charges of flightiness and dilettantism are less likely to be valid.
In fact they are unlikely to be valid if a consistent direction can be
discovered.
Other things being equal, the results of processes, even of secondary
processes, application, patience, etc., are more pertinent from living
writers than from dead ones, or are more pertinent when demon-
strably ἂν RELATION with the living present than with the classified past.
Classic in current publishers’ advertisements seems to have attained
its meaning via classé, range,
The history of literature as taught in many institutions (? all) is
nothing more (hardly more) than a stratified record of snobisms in
which chronology sometimes counts for more than the causal relation
and is also often wholly ignored, | mean ignored usually when it
conflicts with prejudice and when chronological fact destroys a sup-
posed causal relation.
I have resisted several temptations to reply to attacks on How to Read,
because on examination the stricture was usually answered in my own
text, and the attacker, had he been serious, could have found the cor-
rection where he assumed the fault. Several objectors (ut ante) simply
have not taken the trouble to consider what my lists are lists of,
Others ignorant of the nature of some of the texts cited have
assumed that they are not what they are,
Others have assumed that where, for sake of brevity, | have not given
reasons for the inclusion of certain items, no reasons exist or can
possibly.
Madox Ford made a serious charge, but not against what is on the
pages of the booklet. He indicated that a section of what would be a
more nearly complete treatise on the whole art of composition was
not included. You can’t get everything into 45 pages. Nor did the
author of How te Read claim universal knowledge and competence.
Neither in the title nor anywhere in the text did the booklet claim to
be a treatise on the major structure of novels and epics, nor even a
guide to creative composition.
As for experiment: the claim is that without constant experiment
literature dies, Experiment is one of the elements necessary to its life,
Experiment aims at writing that will have a relation to the present
analogous to the relation which past masterwork had to the life of its
time.
398

PREFATIO AUT CIMICIUM TUMULUS
Eliot applying what he has learned from
Morire.
Cupio.
Profugo.
Paenitiunt fugae.
Medea.
Fiam.
Mater es.
Cui sim vides.
applying what he has learned by being bored with as much of the rest
of Seneca as he has bothered to read, is a vastly more vital Eliot, and a
much more intensively critical Eliot than when complying with the
exigencies of the present and verminous system for the excernment of
book-reviews.
I might also assert that Eliot going back to the original has derived a
vastly more vivid power than was possible to the century and more of
Elizafiers who were content to lap the cream off Lamband Hazlitt or to
assume a smattering of Elizabethan bumbast from Elizabethan de-
rivers, Quad erat demonstrandum. Quod erat indicatum, even by the present
disturber of repose anno 1917 and thereabouts. And herein lies also the
confutation of that horrible turba parasitorum paedagogorumgue volgus which
Mr. Eliot tolerates in his vicinage.
‘ACTIVE ANTHOLOGY’
(Retrospect twenty months later)
A dislike of Bunting's poetry and Zukofsky’s is possibly due to haste.
Their verse is more thoughtful than toffee-lickest require. At intervals,
months apart, I remember a passage, or I re-open my volume of
excerpts and find something solid, It did not incinerate any Hudson
river. Neither did Marianne Moore's when it first (20 years since) came
to London, You have to read such verse slowly.
Apart from Bunting and Zukofsky, Miss Moore's is the solidest stuff
in the Anthology. Williams’ is simple by comparison—not so thought-
ful. It has a larger audience because of its apparent simplicity, It is the
lyric of an aptitude. Aptitude, not attitude. Anschauung, that Dr.
Williams has stuck in and to for half a century. The workmanship is
not so much cared for, And yet Williams has become the first prose
writer in America, the best prose writer who now gets into print,
McAlmon having disappeared from circulation, and being a different
case altogether, panoramic Velasquez, where Williams is just solid.
What goes into his case note is THERE. If there is any more solid
solidity outside Papa Gustave, I don’t know where to find it.
399

THE ART OF POETRY
Joyce was not more substantial in the Portrait of the Artist. 1am not
sure that the cutting hasn’t lightened his block.
In his verse Williams’ integrity passes for simplicity. Unadulterated
non-elaboration in the phrase, a ‘simple substance’, simple has an
analogous meaning; whereas Zukofsky, Bunting and Miss Moore
are all thoughtful, much more so than the public desires.
‘Man is not an end product’, is much too condensed a phrase to
tickle the gobbler.
The case of Cummings’ ‘eimi’ and the bearing of Cocteau's sensibility
on this discussion will have to wait further, and more thorough,
treatment than I have given them, Mr. Wyndham Lewis’ Apes looms
somewhere in the domain of Gulliver and Tristram Shandy.

PART EIGHT
Contemporaries

 

PART EIGHT
The Divine Mystery” *
outside a Pagan city of Africa, when the lord of the thunder
appeared before me, going on his way into the town to call down
thunder from heaven upon it.
‘He had on his wizard’s robe, hung round with magical shells that
rattled as he moved; and there walked behind him a young man
carrying a lute. I gave the musician a piece of silver, and he danced
before me the dance that draws down the thunder. After which he
went his way into the town; and the people were gathered together
in the courtyard of the king's house; and he danced before them all.
Then it thundered for the first time in many days; and the king gave
the thunder-maker a black goat-the immemorial reward of the per-
forming god.
‘So begins the history of the Divine Man, and such is his rude
nativity. The secret of genius is sensitiveness. The Genius of the
Thunder who revealed himself to me could not call the thunder, but
he could be called by it. He was more quick than other men to feel
the changes of the atmosphere; perhaps he had rendered his nervous
system more sensitive still by fasting or mental abstraction; and he had
learned to read his own symptoms as we read a barometer. So, when
he felt the storm gathering round his head, he put on his symbolical
vestment, and marched forth to be its Word, the archetype of all
Heroes in all Mysteries.’
I was sitting like Abraham in my tent door in the heat of the day,
So begins the most fascinating book on folk-lore that I have ever
opened. I can scarcely call ita book on ‘folk-lore’, itis a consummation,
It is a history of the development of human intelligence, It is not a
mass of theories, it is this history told in a series of vivid and precise
illustrations, like the one I have chosen for quotation. It is not a
philosophy, yet it manages to be an almost complete expression of
philosophy. Mr. Upward has been ‘resident’ in Nigeria; he has had
much at first hand, and in all his interpretation of documents he has
never for an instant forgotten that documents are but the shadow of
the fact. He has never forgotten the very real man inside the event or
* The Divine Mystery, by Allen 1 The New Freewoman (The Fgvist),
Upward. (Garden City Press.) 15 November (1913).
pward. ( ty
403

CONTEMPORARIES
the history. It is this which distinguishes him from all the encyclo-
paedists who have written endlessly upon corn gods, ete.
Moreover, he thinks.
He thinks, il pense. He is intelligent. Good God ! is it nota marvel that
in the age of Cadbury and Northcliffe, and the ‘Atlantic Monthly’ and
the present ‘English Review’, etc., etc., ad nauseam, is it not an over-
whelming wonder that a thinking sentient being should still inhabit
this planet and be allowed to publish a book!
Very well then, Mr. Upward is intelligent. He is cognizant of the
forces of intelligence and has traced, in some measure, their influence.
He has traced the growth of religion and superstition from the primi-
tive type of the ἡ gate alin to the idea of the messiah. He has
traced many of the detestable customs of modern life to their roots in
superstition.
The first half of the book is planned, ifit can be called so, on the slow
recognition of the sun. That is to say, primitive man turns from his
worship of the dead, and of the earth and of various fears, to a worship
of the life-giving Helios. The solar missionary says it is unnecessary to
bury a man in the cornfield in order that crops shall rise by virtue
of his spirit. The Aten disc is explained. The “Dies Irae’ turns out to be
a relic of fire worship. The ‘Divine Mystery’ necessitates a new transla-
tion of the bible. And if the ecclesiastical mind were not ossified beyond
all hope of revivification we should see the introductory notes
above the chapters abandoned in favour of something related to
truth.
Mr. Upward has left the charming pastoral figure of Jesus in a more
acceptable light than have the advocates of ‘That religion which the
Nazarene has been accused of having founded.’
He has derived the word God from the word Goat, which will be a
satisfaction to many, He has related prophecy to astrology, and has
shown the new eras to be related to the ascent of the successive signs
of the zodiac in which the sun appears, changing his mansion about
once in each eight centuries,
The book itself is a summary, a leisured summary, that does not cut
corners, or leave one with insufficient information. Still it contains so
much and so much of vivid interest that it is very nearly impossible to
review it,
It is a book full of suggestion for half a dozen sorts of specialist, at the
same time it is legible and so clearly written that one has no need of
specialised knowledge to read it,
I, personally, find in it clues and suggestions for the Provengal love
customs of the Middle Ages-in the chapter on early marriage laws.
Modern marriage is, apparently, derived from the laws of slave con-
cubinage, not from the more honourable forms of primitive European
marriage. So much for the upholders of ‘Sacrament’.
404

THE DIVINE MYSTERY
It is great satisfaction to find a nice, logical book, where all the cant-
ing fools who have plagued one are—no, not ‘abused’, but where an
author, writing in a gentle and reasonable tone, presenting simple fact
after simple fact, undermines their position, and shows them naked in
all their detestability, in all their unutterable silliness.
The lovely belief in a durable hot hell dates back to the Parsee who
squatted over a naphtha volcano. And various other stupidities still
prevalent are shown to be as little inspired by either divine or human
intelligence. It is a great book for liberations.
Someday, when the circulationists are nearly forgotten, people will
take note of Mr. Upward’s work in fundamentals. His ‘The New Word’
will be recognised, instead of being ranted about by a few enthusiasts.
He is wholly careless of certain matters; he is apparently quite will-
ing that his work should be immortal in general belief, instead of being
‘preserved’ in specific works.
This author is a focus, that is to say he has a sense of major relations,
The enlightenments of our era have come to him. He has seen how
the things ‘put together’.
It is pleasing to know that the ordinary native’s hunt in Africa sets
out with an ark of the covenant every whit as sacred as the junk box
which the Israelites carried before them.
Especially if one has been ‘reared in the Christian faith’ and been
forced to eat at the same table with ministers and members of the
Y.M.C.A., it is pleasant to know for certain just what part of their
conversation is pure buncomb.
1 do not wish to lead anyone into the belief that this is an impious
book. I believe Allen Upward to be one of the devoutest men of the
age. He insists that the real God is neither a cad nor an imbecile, and
that is, to my mind, a fairly good ground for religion.
‘All that has been was right, and will be wrong.’ He shows that even
the crusades of the earlier and now detestable religions came in their
own time as liberations.
It is a very difficult work to review. How Mr. Upward has managed
to tell so many interesting facts in three hundred pages, is somewhat
beyond me. It is, | must repeat, a clarifying book, it is not a set of facts
very rigorously chosen in proportion to their interest. The idea of the
goddess, the mother goddess, is analysed; queenship and kingship and
the priesthood are treated. Mr. Upward is not only perspicacious, but
his mind is balanced by nature and by a knowledge of the Chinese
classics. He is nowhere content with a sham.
Speaking in moderation, I suppose one might call ‘The Divine
Mystery’ a book indispensable to clergymen, legislators, students of
folk-lore, and the more intelligent public.
Ido not write this as a specialist; but judging by those points where
Mr, Upward’s specialité coincides with my own, Ishould say that he was
405

CONTEMPORARIES
led by a scholarship not only wide but precise. He shows remarkable
powers of synthesis.
However correct or incorrect I may be in my estimate, of this at
least lam certain: no sane man will be bored during the hours he gives
to the reading of this book.

Allen Upward Serious’
tis a curious thing about England’???? No, it is not a ‘curious
thing’ about England or about anywhere else, it is a natural habit
of il mal seme d’ Adamo that they neglect the clear thinker in his
own day. And ifa man have done valuable work of one sort, and have,
at the same time, done vendible work of another, the vendible work
will kill him among the little clique who decide whether or no one is
to be ‘taken seriously’. So Mr. Upward is known for short stories of a
sort, and not for two books, as interesting philosophically as any that
have been written in our time.
Of course, any man who thinks is a bore. He will either make you
think or he will despise, irritate and insult you if you don’t, and all this
is very distressing.
What for instance could be more distressing to a wooden-headed
imbecile, fat with his own scholastic conceit, than such a clearly-
written paragraph as that which follows?
‘That old talk about the Gods, which is called mythology, is
confused in many ways, partly because all language is confused,
rtly because it is a layer of many languages, When the talkers no
longer used the beast as an idol they used it as a symbol, in short a
word; when they no longer slew the real Christ at Easter they
named the sun at Easter, Christ, Their language is tangled and
twisted beyond our power wholly to unravel because it was beyond
their power; because it began as a tangle when man’s mind was still
a blur, and he saw men as trees walking, and trees as men standing
still, How hard the old cloistered scholarship to which the Nobels
of a bygone age gave their endowments has toiled to understand the
word glaukopis given to the goddess Athene. Did it mean blue-eyed
or grey-eyed, or~by the aid of Sanskrit-merely glare-eyed? And all
the time they had not only the word glaux staring them in the face,
but they had the owl itself cut at the foot of every statue of Athene
and stamped on every coin of Athens, to tell them that she was the
owl-eyed goddess, the lightning that blinks like an owl. For what is
characteristic of the owl's eyes is not that they glare, but that they
suddenly leave off glaring like lighthouses whose light is shut off.
We may sce the shutter of the lightning in that mask that overhangs
Athene’s brow and hear its click in the word glaukos, And the leaf-
age of the olive whose writhen trunk bears, as it were, the lightning’s
! The New Age, 23 April 1914,
407

CONTEMPORARIES
brand, does not glare but glitters, the pale under face of the leaves
alternating with the dark upper face, and so the olive is Athene‘s
tree and is called glaukos.! Why need we carry owls to Oxford?’
That is the sort of clarity and hard writing that one finds all through
‘The New Word’. Of course, it is very irritating: if you suggest to
Mr, Upward that his mind is as clear as Bacon's, he will agree with you.
If you suggest to Mr. Upward that his middles are less indefinite than
Plato’s, he will agree with you. If you suggest to him that one man
who thinks is worth a dozen ambulating works of reference, he will
agree with you; and all this is very annoying to the supporters of
things at large, for our ambulating works of reference are far more
numerous than our thinkers.
The writer of this present essay has suffered from a modern educa-
tion; he has met a number of ambulating works of reference; his
respect for the mnemonic mind has been lessened by contact, and by
the presence in the modern world of the cinematograph and the
gramophone.
Mr. Upward has taken up the cause of intelligence, of the perceptive
man; it is the height of quixotism on his part. If you refer to him as a
thinker, if you say his mind is less messy than Bergson‘s, they tell you
he writes detective stories. Yet if ‘The New Word’ and ‘The Divine
Mystery’ had been written by a civil servant or a clerk in a dry goods
shop, or by a broken-down parson, they would have been acclaimed
as great works, They would have been patted on their covers by ‘The
Edinburgh’, etc.
But there is something so degrading~at least, one would think that
there were something so degrading in the practice of writing as a
trade—that anyone who has once earned a livelihood, or part of it,
obviously and openly, by popular writing, can never be seriously
regarded by any great number of people, And then, of course, ‘he does
too much’, The populace, the reading populace, is like the fat critic in
‘Fanny’s First Play’, it cannot conceive the same man doing two kinds
of work, or at least it won't. It is perfectly logical. It is insanely logical.
On the other hand, one clear, hard paragraph like the one quoted
is enough to queer a man’s chances. ‘How,’ say the professors, ‘is this
man a classicist? Why does he not stick to his trade? Why does he
expose our patent error? To hell with him!’
How!" says the windy logomachist, who believes that if a thing is
worth doing it is worth doing badly. ‘Clear, hard, serious, specialised
writing from a journalist. Damn him.’
And then of course, there’s the church; nearly everybody has an
uncle or a cousin who gets paid for believing, officially, in the estab-
! See Canto LXXIV, p. 466, Faber CX. Ed.
edition, U.S. Edition p, 438, and Canto
408

ALLEN UPWARD SERIOUS
lished church. It won't do to think about religion too seriously or else
we'll have to scrap the lot; all the established salaries. We must not
treat this gentleman too gravely. Let us label him a brilliant superficial
writer, So it goes,
Mr. Upward has taken up the cause of the sensitive; and the sensi-
tives are too few and too indolent to support him, save in their slow
and ultimately victorious manner,
Of course, what Mr. Upward says will be believed in another twenty
of fifty or a hundred years, just as a lot of Voltaire’s quiet thrusts are
now a part of our gospel. Mr. Upward will be nicely buried and no
living curate will be out of a job, so that will be all right.
Mr. Upward takes on the lot of ‘em. If he were content to poke fun
at one science... ah! But he says most scientists are stupid, or some-
thing of that sort: most of the rank and file-but what is the use of
talking about mosts?
Let us search for Mr. Upward's dangerous and heretical doctrines.
Most mild is their aspect. Thus:
‘When, instead of thinking of men one by one you think of them
all at once and call your thought humanity, you have merely
added a new word to the dictionary and not a new thing to the
contents of the universe.’
That ought to be fairly obvious.
‘Altruism is the principle that mankind ought to serve those who
are serving it, but not those who are not serving it.”
Ah!
‘It used to be written... “All men are liars.” .. . “It repented the
Lord that he had made man.” No one would dare to say such things
about Humanity.”
‘The religion of Humanity is not the worship of the best man nor
of the best in man. It is the worship of the middling man."
This begins to look ugly.
And still he goes on. He draws an invidious comparison between
science and ‘scientology’. He propounds riddles. He asks: ‘When is the
good not good?’ and answers, ‘When it is an abstract noun.’ Perplex-
ing!
‘In the beginning the Goat created heaven and earth.’
It is the astrological goat, but it gets the churchman’s.
‘The religion which that Idealist (i.c., Christ) has been accused of
founding.’
‘The ultimate nature of Materialism is the worship of fixity under
a hundred names.’
409

CONTEMPORARIES
‘I think that no two men have ever had wholly the same religion,
and I am sure no two men ought to."
“Whatever is has been right and will be wrong.’
‘The Churchmen had no doubt that Aquinas was a saint. They
applied a simple test and found that, however impartial might be
the summing up, the verdict was always in their favour.’
‘Today this book (Aquinas), the greatest book of Catholic Theo-
logy, ranks as a curiosity rather than as literature. And that is not
because, like the book of Copernicus it has done its work, but
because no one any longer hopes that it can do any work.’
‘The bloodiest iconoclasts the world has ever seen ought not to
whine so miserably when their own idol is being washed.’
Of course, Mr. Upward should not assail the scientists, the philolo-
gists and the churchmen all in one book, What faction will come to his
aid? What formed party will support him?
The clear-headed logician has lost sight of psychology, of crowd
psychology. One should always compromise with fools, one should
always be sure to please a majority of the dullards, if one desire
immediate results,
What! Not desire immediate results? Do I suggest that any man is
content to await the verdict of the future, or at least of the next
generation?
Supposing I do?
Of course, I am not an impartial judge. 1 think all established
churches an outrage, save in so far as they teach medicine and courage
to the more obfuscated heathen, and they don't do such a lot of that.
But on the whole they are nearly as great a pest as were the ‘fat bellies
of the monks toward the end of the Middle Ages’; they sit in fat
livings; they lead lives of intellectual sloth supported by subsidies
originally intended, at least in part, for ‘clerks’, for clerics who were
supposed to need a certain shelter wherein to conduct the intellectual
life of the race. One demands purely and simply that people oust the
parson from his feathered eyrie, and put in it some constructive per-
son, some thinker, or artist, or scientific experimenter, or some
teacher of something or other, which he can himself take seriously
and which might conceivably be of some use to the race, They might
take to reading Confucius . .. if it amused them, Or they might even
talk seriously about their professed religion instead of playing the
barrister, But this is a matter aside. It is one of the minute corollaries
of Mr. Upward’s work as I understand it. It is a part of what he calls
‘Altruism’.
I recognise the danger of leaving Mr. Upward at large. Not an
immediate peril! I recognise also the need of some sort of delayed
book reviewing. I mean that the present advertising system provides
410

ALLEN UPWARD SERIOUS
that all books of whatever merit shall be praised by a certain number of
people the instant they appear; that certain kinds of books, or certain
particular books, shall be largely circulated; and that certain, practi-
cally all, books, save books of verse, go into desuetude within a year or
so.
There should be a new sort of semi—critic, semi—reviewer, to go over
the mess of books that are a few years old and pick out the few worth
saving, the few that he still remembers. It is something of that sort
that | am trying.
We all recognise the type of writer produced by present conditions,
who keeps in the public eye by a continuous output of inferior work.
He is known for his persistent ubiquity. Damn him! I want some more
efficient machinery for the preservation of the sort of writer who only
writes when he has something to say, who produces odd sorts of books
in uncommercial sizes.
I think also that we should try to discriminate between the real man
and his secondary emanations. Does it matter the least whether Mr.
Upward plays golf or writes detective stories in the intervals between
his serious work?
I present Mr. Upward’s dicta rather jerkily, partly because I think the
readers of The New Age are heartily sick of my writing, and partly
because I believe they do not want their pabulum diluted, and that
they are able to build up the intellectual consequences of a given
theme. However, I cannot quote Mr. Upward entire, and I cannot
adequately represent his trend in scattered quotations, so I must needs
make a partial summary of certain things that he stands for, or that he
appears to me to stand for; certain conclusions which I draw more or
less from his books.
1, That a nation is civilised in so far as it recognises the special facul-
ties of the individual, and makes use thereof. You do not weigh coals
with the assayer's balance.
1a. Corollary. Syndicalism. A social order is well balanced when the
community recognises the special aptitudes of groups of men and
applies them.
2. That Mr. Upward’s propaganda is for a syndicat of intelligence;
of thinkers and authors and artists.
2a. That such a guild is perfectly in accord with Syndicalist doctrines,
That it would take its place with the guilds of more highly skilled
craftsmen.
3. That Mr. Upward ‘sees further into a mile—stone, etc.‘, | mean that
his propaganda is for the recognition of the man who can see the
meaning of data, not necessarily as opposed to, but as supplementary
to, the man who is only capable of assembling or memorising such
data, nore.-This latter sort of man is the only sort now provided
411

CONTEMPORARIES
for by the American University system. I cannot speak for the
English.
Arhtoele said something about ‘the swift perception of relations’.
He said it was the hall mark of genius.
The Century Magazine wants to bring its fiction ‘as near to truth, and
make it as interpretive of life, as conditions allow’ (Century Magazine
for September, 1913, page 791, col. 2, lines 29 and 30). Mr. Upward has
nothing to do with this spirit. ‘As conditions allow’ !!!! 1! ‘Let the
bridge come as near to bearing the strain of traffic “as conditions
allow”. *
4, That since Christ's notable success-in gaining a reputation, 1
mean~a number of people have desired to ‘save the world’ without
undergoing the inconvenience of crucifixion.
5. That Mr, Upward is a very capable thinker, and that he deserves
more attention than he now gets.
412

Remy de Gourmont'
I
tis foolish, perhaps, to say that a man ‘stands for all that is best in
such and such a country’. It is a vague phrase, and the use of vague
phrases is foolish, and yet Remy de Gourmont had in some way
made himself into asymbol of so much that is finest in France that one
is tempted to apply some such phrase to him.
Ithink no man in France could have died leaving so personal a sense
of loss among scattered groups of intelligent young men who had
never laid eyes on him. I do not mean to say that he was the ‘greatest
writer in France’. That method of assessing authors by size is unfortun-
ate and Victorian. There were in France a few pre-eminently good
writers: Anatole France, Remy de Gourmont, Henri de Regnier,
Francis Jammes, Laurent Tailhade. There are popular figures and
crazes like Maeterlinck, Claudel, and Paul Fort. lam not an examining
board trying to determine which of these gentlemen is to receive the
highest award. I am not determining a percentage of bay leaves, The
writings of the five first-mentioned men are all of them indispensable
to one’s comfort,
Yet before the war Anatole France was so old that communication
between him and the active part of our world had almost ceased. And
Henri de Regnier was set apart, as it were, amid ‘The Spoils of Poyn-
ton’, or behind some such metaphorical barrier. And Jammes, after
four beautiful books to his credit, had gone gaya over catholicism,
and from Remy de Gourmont alone there proceeded a personal,
living force. ‘Force’ is almost a misnomer; let us call it a personal
light.
The man was infused through his work. if you ‘hold a pistol to my
head’ and say: ‘Produce the masterpiece on which you base these
preposterous claims for De Gourmont!’ I might not be able to lay out
an array of books to equal those of his elder friend, Anatole France, or
of De Regnier, or to find three volumes of poems to compare with the
first books by Francis Jammes, or, indeed, to uphold that test against
various men whose names I have not mentioned. You, on the other
hand, would be in yery much the same fix if you were commanded
suddenly to produce the basis of your respect for De Quincey or
Coleridge.
* The Fortnightly Review, 1915.
413

LUNIEMIIRARNIDO
Iv is, I think, Coleridge who says that the test of a great poet is not
to be found in individual passages, but in a mysterious pervasive es-
sence, ‘everywhere present and nowhere a distinct excitement’.
As you read De Gourmont’s work it is not any particular phrase,
poem, or essay that holds you, so much as a continuing sense of
intelligence, of a limpid, active intelligence in the mind of the writer,
lexpress, perhaps, a personal and an unpopular emotion when I say
that this constant sense of the intelligence of the man behind the
writing is a re comfort, I even hope that intelligence, in writers, is
coming back, if not into fashion, at least into favour with a public
large enough to make certain kinds of books once more printable,
We have suffered a period in which the glorification of stupidity and
the worship of unintelligent, ‘messy’ energy have been too much
encouraged, (With the appearance of James Joyce and T. S. Eliot, and
the more ‘normal’ part of Mr. Wyndham Lewis's narrative writings,
one may even hope that intelligence shall once more have its innings,
even in our own stalwart tongue.)
The qualities of Remy de Gourmont’s intelligence? Limpidity and
fairness and graciousness, and irony, and a sensuous charm in his
decoration when he chose to make his keen thought flash out against
a richly-coloured background; these things were all in his writing.
The peculiarity of his narrative work may have been just this method
of resting the mind as it were by an ‘aroma’. What shall | call it?
He stirs the ‘senses of the imagination’, the reader is pervaded by
luxurious rest, and then when the mind is most open, De Gourmont
darts in with his acumen, a thrust, an incisive or revolutionary idea,
spoken so softly,
His ‘Diomédes’ searches for truth in the Rue Bonaparte and en-
virons, As Turgenev builds up a whole novel to enforce two or three
Russian proverbs; to make you know that he, the author, has under-
stood some very simple phrase in all its profundity; as in the ‘Nichée
de Gentilshommes’ he has put first, ‘The heart of another is a dark
forest,’ and then in the middle of the book, man, his hero, opposed
to the old trees of his dismantled garden, and then finally old Maria
Timofevna’s ‘Nothing but death is irrevocable,’ so, in a very different
manner Remy de Gourmont has embedded his philosophy in a
luxurious mist of the senses, But this particularity of method would in
itself amount to very little.
De Gourmont wrote twice a month, a little ‘Epilogue’ in the
Mercure de France, Early in his career he had written a large and beautiful
book Le Latin Mystique du Moyen Age, and in this book he laid before his
few readers a great amount of forgotten beauty, the beauty of a period
slighted by philological scholars. These were causes contributory to his
position, but no one of them would have accounted for it.
His work had what very little work ever has, despite continuous
414

REMI DE GUURMUNI
advertisements to the contrary. It had a personal charm, and this
charm was that of intelligence.
Ideas came to him asa series of fine wines to a delicate palate, and he
was never inebriated. He never ran amok. And this is the whole
difference between the French and Tedescan systems: a German never
knows when a thought is ‘only to be thought’-to be thought out in
all its complexity and its beauty-and when it is to be made a basis of
action.
I believe England guards against such mistakes by mistrusting
thought altogether. At least | once saw a very amusing encounter, as
follows: A Russian, who had taken degrees at Leipzig on prehistoric
Greek philosophers, came to England. He believed that ‘The Germans
are the only Greeks of today.’ He was going, at least he said he
was going, ‘to convert England to philosophy’. It was a noble
adventure.
He propounded his crusade in a company consisting of two for-
eigners, myself, and one Englishman, All the Englishman said was,
‘I don't believe in ideas."
It was a very sincere personal statement. The Russian shortly after-
wards retired to Paris, to start a peripatetic school in the ‘Jardins du
Luxembourg’, but he finally went to America, and was at once made a
professor.
England has been very safe with her ‘Don't believe in ideas.’ Ger-
many has got decidedly and disgustingly drunk. But Paris is the labora-
tory of ideas; it is there that poisons can be tested, and new modes of
sanity be discovered, It is there that the antiseptic conditions of the
laboratory exist. That is the function of Paris.
It was peculiarly the function of De Gourmont,
For years he has written ‘controversially’, if 1 may use a word with
such strong connotations. I believe he has never once made an over-
statement, or, for that matter, an under-statement of his thought.
I don’t say that he has always been right. But he had this absolute fair-
ness, the fairness of a man watching his own experiment in laboratory.
And this absolute fairness, this absolute openness to all thought, is
precisely the most difficult thing to attain,
We are all touched with the blight of Tertullian. Whatever our aims
and ambitions and our firm conviction to the contrary, we have our
moments off guard when we become unfair, and partisan, and per-
sonal in our spite, and intolerant.
De Gourmont carried his lucidity to the point of genius. All ideas,
all works of art, all writing came to him, and he received them all
graciously, and he praised graciously, or he ignored graciously.
1 This tale is not a figment of my imagination; it is not allegory, but fact.
415

eNN MN NNNN
And he wrote beautifully and graciously from himself. He was
the friend of intelligence. He had not lost touch with ‘les jeunes’.
And that last is more important and more difficult than one might
think. If a man has ‘come in’ with one generation and taken part in
the development of and triumph of one ‘new’ set of ideas, it is especi-
ally and peculiarly difficult for him to adapt himself to the next set,
which comes in some twenty years later. No man can lead two move-
ments, and it is very hard for him to understand two movements.
A movement degenerates into over-emphasis. It begins with the
recognition of a neglect. When youth is divided into acrimonious
parties it is perhaps difficult for age to tell which side has the intelli-
gence, but you could trust Remy de Gourmont to discover intelli-
gence in whatever form it might appear.
It is a slight thing that I am going to tell now, but it is not without
its minute significance. When I was in Paris some years ago I happened,
by merest accident, to be plunged into a meeting, a vortex of twenty
men, and among them five or six of the most intelligent young men
in Paris, I should say that Paris is a place like another; in ‘literature’ the
French are cursed with amorphous thought, rhetoric, bombast,
Claudel, etc., stale Hugo, stale Corneille, etc., just as we are cursed here
with stale Victoriana, stale Miltoniana, etc. The young party of intelli-
gence in Paris, a party now just verging on the threshold of middle-
age, is the group that centred about ‘L’Effort Libre’. It contains Jules
Romains, Vildrac, Duhamel, Chenneviére, Jouve, and their friends.
These men were plotting a gigantic blague. A ‘blague’ when it is a fine
blague is a satire upon stupidity, an attack. It is the weapon of intelli-
gence at bay; of intelligence fighting against an alignment of odds.
These men were thorough. They had exposed a deal of ignorance and
stupidity in places where there should have been the reverse. They
were serious, and they were ‘keeping it up’. And the one man they
mentioned with sympathy, the one older man to whom they could
look for comprehension, and even for discreet assistance, was Remy
de Gourmont. Remy would send them a brief telegram to be read at
their public meeting.
That is, at first sight, a very trifling matter, but, if examined closely,
it shows a number of things; first, that de Gourmont was absolutely
independent, that he was not tied to any institution, that his position
was based on his intelligence alone and not on his ‘connections’ (as I
believe they are called in our ‘literary world’).
“Franchement d'écrire ce qu’on pense, seul plaisir d’un écrivain,’
‘To put down one's thought frankly, a writer's one pleasure.’ That
phrase was the centre of Gourmont's position. It was not a phrase
understood superficially, It is as much the basis of a clean literature,
of all literature worth the name, as is an antiseptic method, the basis
of sound surgical treatment.
416

REMY DE GOURMONT
‘Franchement’, ‘Frankly’, is ‘Frenchly’, if one may drag in philology.
If, in ten lines or in a hundred pages, I can get the reader to compre-
hend what that one adjective means in literature, what it means to all
civilisation, I shall have led him part of the way toward an under-
standing of de Gourmont’s importance.
‘Frankly’ does not mean ‘grossly’. It does not mean the over-
emphasis of neo-realism, of red-bloodism, of slums dragged into light,
of men writing while drugged with two or three notions, or with the
lust for an epigram. It means simply that a man writes his thought,
that is to say, his doubts, his inconclusions as well as his ‘convictions’,
which last are so often borrowed affairs.
There is no lasting shelter between an intelligent man and his own
perception of truth, but nine-tenths of all writing displays an author
trying, by force of will, to erect such shelter for others. De Gourmont
was one of the rare authors who did not make this stupid endeavour;
who wholly eschewed malingering.
It was not a puritanical privation for him, it was his nature to move
in this way. The mind, the imagination is the proper domain of
freedom. The body, the outer world, is the proper domain of fraternal
deference.
The tedium and the habit of the great ruck of writers is that they are
either incoherent and amorphous, or else they write in conformity
to, or in defence of, a set of fixed, rigid notions, instead of disclosing
their thought... which might, in rare cases, be interesting. It is
to be noted that de Gourmont is never tedious. That is the magic of
clarity.
acy few only, and without gain or joy to themselves, can trans-
form directly the acts of others into their own personal thoughts,
the multitude of men thinks only thoughts already emitted, feels but
feelings used up, and has but sensations as faded as old gloves. When a
new word arrives at its destination, it arrives like a post-card that has
gone round the world and on which the handwriting is blurred
and obliterated with blots and stains.’ I open the ‘Chevaux de
Diomédes’ at random and come upon that passage of Gourmont's
thought.
‘Non é mai tarde per tentar l‘ignoto,!
Non é mai tarde per andar pit oltre,’
but it was never with the over-orchestration of the romantic period,
nor with the acrid and stupid crudity of societies for the propagation of
this, that, and the other, that de Gourmont’s mind went placidly out
into new fields,
He never abandoned beauty. The mountain stream may be as
1 Quoted in Canto XCIIL Ed. See note on page 25. Ed,
417

CONTEMPORARIES
antiseptic as the sterilised dressing. There was the quality and the
completeness of life in de Gourmont's mode of procedure. Just
as there is more wisdom, perhaps more ‘revolution’, in Whistler's
portrait of young Miss Alexander than in all the Judaic drawings of
the ‘prophetic’ Blake, so there is more life in Remy than in all the
reformers,
Voltaire called in a certain glitter to assist him. De Gourmont’s
ultimate significance may not be less than Voltaire’s. He walked
gently through the field of his mind. His reach, his ultimate efficiency
are just this; he thought things which other men cannot, for an
indefinitely prolonged period of time, be prevented from thinking.
His thoughts were not merely the fixed mental habits of the animal
homo.
And TI call the reader to witness that he, de Gourmont, differed from
Fabians, Webbists, Shavians (all of whom, along with all dealers in
abstractions, are ultimately futile). He differed from them in that his
thoughts had the property of life. They, the thoughts, were all related
to life, they were immersed in the manifest universe while he thought
them, they were not cut out, put on shelves and in bottles.
Anyone who has read him will know what I mean. Perhaps it is
quite impossible to explain it to one who has not.
In poetry as in prose de Gourmont has built up his own particular
form. I am not sure that he was successful, in fact | am rather con-
vinced that he was not successful in the ‘Simone’, where he stays
nearer the poetic forms invented by others. His own mode began, I
think, with the translation of the very beautiful ‘sequaire' of Goddes-
chalk in Le Latin Mystique. This he made, very possibly, the basis of his
‘Livre de Litanies’, at least this curious evocational form, the curious
repetitions, the personal sweeping rhythm, are made wholly his own,
and he used them later in ‘Les Saints de Paradis’, and last of all in the
prose sonnets.
These ‘sonnets’ are among the few successful endeavours to write
poetry of our own time. I know there is much superficial modernity, butin
these prose sonnets Remy de Gourmont has solved the two thorniest
questions, The first difficulty in a modern poem is to give a feeling of
the reality of the speaker, the second, given the reality of the speaker,
to gain any degree of poignancy in one's utterance.
That is to say, you must begin in a normal, natural tone of voice,
and you must, somewhere, express or cause a deep feeling, Lam, let
us say, in an omnibus with Miscio Itow. He has just seen some Japanese
armour and says it is like his grandfather’s, and then simply running
on in his own memory he says; “When I first put on my grandfather's
helmet, my grandmother cried ... because I was so like what my
grandfather was at eighteen.’
418

REMY DE GOURMONT
You may say that Itow is himself an exotic, but still, there is material
for an hokku, and poetry does touch modern life, or at least pass over
it swiftly, though it does not much appear in modern verses.
De Gourmont has not been driven even to an exotic speaker. His
sonnets begin in the metropolis. The speaker is past middle age. It is a
discussion of what he calls in the course of the sequence of poems ‘la
géométrie subordonnée du corps humain‘.
I shall give a dozen or more phrases from the sequence (which
consists, if | remember rightly, of about two dozen poems). By this
means I shall try to give, not a continuous meaning, but ache the
tone, the conversational, ironic, natural tone of the writing, the
scientific dryness, even, as follows;
“Mes déductions sont certains. .. .
“Mais le blanc est fondamental. ...
‘Jai plus aimé les yeux que toutes les autres manifestations
corporelles de la beauté. …
‘Les yeux sont le manomètre de la machine animale. .. .
‘Et leurs paroles signifient le désir de T'etre, ou la placidité de sa
volonté....
*Mais on pense aussi avec les mains, avec les genoux, avec les yeux,
avec la bouche et avec le coeur. On pense avec tous les organes, …
*Et à vrai dire, nous ne sommes peut-etre que pens€e. ...
‘Je parlerais des yeux, je chanterais les yeux toute ma vie. Je sais
toutes leurs couleurs et toutes leurs volontés, leur destinée. …
‘Dont je n‘ignore pas les correspondances. . . .
‘C’est une belle chose qu‘une tête de femme, librement inscrite
dans le cercle esthétique. ...’
Or even more solidly:
‘Je sculpte une hypothése dans le marbre de la logique éter-
nelle....
“Les épaules sont des sources d'oú descend la fluidité des bras. .. ?
And then, when one is intent and wholly off guard, comes, out of
this ‘unpoetic’, unemotional constatation, the passage:
‘Les yeux se font des discours entre eux.
Près de se ternir . . . les miens te parleront encore, mais ils n'empor-
teront pas bien loin ta réponse,
Car on n’emporte rien, on meurt. Laisse-moi done regarder les
yeux que j'ai decouverts,
Les yeux qui me survivront.’
He has worn off the trivialities of the day, he has conquered the fret
of contemporaneousness by exhausting it in his pages of dry discussion,
419

CONTEMPORARIES
and we come on the feeling, the poignancy, as directly as we do in the
old poet’s-
Adyovaw al yuvaines
Ανακρέων γέρων εἶ
‘Dicunt mihi puellae
Anacreon senex es.'
It is the triumph of skill and reality, though it is barbarous of me to
try to represent the force of the original poems by such a handful of
phrases taken at random, and I am not trying to convince anyone
who will not read the ‘Sonnets in Prose’ for himself.
IP
Remy de Gourmont is dead and the world’s light is darkened. This is
another of the crimes of the war, for de Gourmont was only fifty-
seven, and if he had not been worried to death, if he had not been
grieved to death by the cessation of all that has been ‘life’ as he under-
stood it, there was no reason why we should not have had more of his
work and his company.
He is as much ‘dead of the war’ as if he had died in the trenches, and
he left with almost the same words on his lips. ‘Nothing is being done
in Paris, nothing can be done, faute de combatants.’ There was an elegy on
current writing by him in the Mercure, It was almost the same tone in
which Gaudier-Brzeska wrote to me a few days before he was shot at
Neuville St. Vaast: ‘Is anything of importance or even of interest going
on in the world - I mean the “artistic London”?’
Remy de Gourmont is irreplaceable. I think I do not write for
myself alone when I say no other Frenchman could have died leaving
50 personal a sense of loss in the minds of many young men who had
never laid eyes on him, Some fames and reputations are like that;
Mallarmé is almost a mantram, a word for conjuring. A critique of
de Gourmont's poetry would be by no means a critique of his in-
fluence. For, again, I think that every young man in London whose
work is worth considering at all, has felt that in Paris existed this
gracious presence, this final and kindly tribunal where all work would
stand on its merits. One had this sense of absolute fairness—no prestige,
no over-emphasis, could work upon it.
“Permettre d ceux qui en valent la peine d‘écrire franchement ce qu‘il pense—seul
plaisir d'un écrivain’ : these were almost the last words he wrote to me,
save a postscript on the outside of the envelope; and they are almost
his ‘whole law and gospel’. And indeed a right understanding of them
means the whole civilisation of letters,
1 Poetry, January 1916. .

REMY DE GOURMONT
Outside a small circle in Paris and a few scattered groups elsewhere,
this civilisation does not exist. Yet the phrase is so plain and simple:
‘to permit those who are worth it to write frankly what they think.’
That is the destruction of all rhetoric and all journalism. I mean
that when a nation, ora group of men, or an editor, arrives at the state
of mind where he really understands that phrase, rhetoric and jour-
nalism are done with. The true aristocracy is founded, permanent
and indestructible. It is also the end of log-rolling, the end of the
British school of criticism for the preservation of orderly and innocu-
ous persons, It is the end of that ‘gravity’ to which Sterne alludes as
“a mysterious carriage of the body to cover the defects of the mind’.
De Gourmont did not make over-statements, His Diomedes is a
hero because he is facing life, he is facing it quite sincerely, with no
protection whatever. Ibsen with his smoky lightning had rumbled out,
‘There is no intermediator between God and man.’ De Gourmont,
with his perfect and gracious placidity, had implied-yes, implied,
made apparent rather than stated—that no formula can stand between
man and life; or rather that no creed, no dogma, can protect the
thinking man from looking at life directly, forming his own thought
from his own sensuous contact and from his contact with thoughts,
Nietzsche has done no harm in France because France has under-
stood that thought can exist apart from action; that it is perfectly
fitting and expedient clearly to think certain things which it is neither
fitting nor expedient to ‘spoil by action’,
‘Spoil by action’ is perhaps a bad memory of the phrase; but just as
Dante was able to consider two thoughts as blending and giving off
music, so Diomedes in De Gourmont’s story is able to think things
which translation into action would spoil. As for Diomedes’ carcer, I
am perfectly willing to accept Robert Frost's statement that ‘there is
nothing like it in New England’. What there is in all provincial places
is an attempt to suppress part of the evidence, to present life out of
proportion with itself, squared to fit some local formula of respecta-
bility.
Reny de Gourmont had written throughout his life in absolute
single-blessedness; it was to express his thought, his delicate, subtle,
quiet and absolutely untrammelled revery, with no regard whatsoever
for existing belief, with no afterthought or beside-thought either to
conform or to avoid conforming. That is the sainthood of literature,
I think I can show what I mean almost by a single sentence. In the
midst of the present whirlwind of abuse he said quietly: ‘By Kultur,
the Germans mean what we mean by “state education”,’
It had been so all his life; on whatever matter, however slight the
matter or however strong his own passion, there had been that same
quiet precision, that same ultimate justness.
The rest of us are caught in the flurry of controversy. Remy de
421

CONTEMPORARIES
Gourmont had found-it might not be incorrect to say that Paris had
given him-a place where all things could be said quietly and openly,
where one would not think of circumlocution and prejudice, where
circumlocution and prejudice would have seemed un-natural.
En tous les pays il y a un noyau de bons esprits, d'esprits libres. Il faut leur donner
quelque chose qui les change de la fadewr des magazines, quelque chose qui leur donne
confiance en eux-mémes, et leur soit un point d'appuí.
That is good news, but for years M, de Gourmont had believed it
and written accordingly. He had written selflessly, and was glad when
other men could write well. He dared to write for the few, for the few
who are not a clique or a faction, but who are united by the ability
to think clearly, and who do not attempt to warp or to smother this
faculty; who do not suppress part of the evidence.
The significance of Remy de Gourmont and the significance of his
poetry are two things apart. He has written for the most part beautiful
prose, much controversy, a book on Le Latin Mystique du Moyen Age, etc.
He has written a poème champètre and some Litanies,
I have praised these litanies elsewhere, and a man’s obituary notice
is not, perhaps, the best place for analysing his metric. Suffice it to say
that the litanies are a marvel of rhythm, that they have not been
followed or repeated, that de Gourmont was not of ‘the young
French school’. If he is ‘grouped’ anywhere he must be grouped, as
poet, among les symbolistes, The litanies are evocation, not statement.
De Gourmont was indubitably ‘of the young’ in the sense that his
mind had not lost its vigour, that he was alive to contemporary
impressions, that he had not gone gaga over catholicism like poor
Francis Jammes, nor wallowed in metrical journalism like the ill-
starred Paul Fort. He had never lost touch with the men born ten or
twenty years after he was; for a man of fifty-seven that is a very con-
siderable achievement. Or rather it is not an achievement, for it can
not be done by effort; it can only come from a natural freshness and
aliveness of the mind, and is a matter of temperament.
I had forgotten the French Academy until an article in L‘Humanité
reminded me that de Gourmont was not a member thereof; that the
ancient association which contains Auguste Swallou, Thibaudet de
Mimmil, and so many other ‘immortals’ had not seen fit to elect him.
It is evident that the ‘Académie Francoise’ has outlived its usefulness,
and if France does not set an example what can be expected of other
academies? In de Gourmont's case the academy had no excuse. He had
not only written supremely, but he had given back to the world a lost
beauty—in Le Latin Mystique, in the Sequaire of Goddeschalk with its Amas
wt facias pulchram.*
1 Quoted Cantos XCHI and XCVIIL Ed.
422

REMT DE GOURMONT
But perhaps, as a friend of mine wrote when Swinburne was refused
sepulture in Westminster Abbey (they said there was no room and
buried the canon‘s wife the week after), perhaps, as my friend wrote at
the time, ‘perhaps it is just as well-he suffered fools badly’.
Ihave known also that the really distinguished member, at a meet-
ing of another ‘great body’, encouraged one of his more serious col-
leagues, who was showing signs of tedium, with ‘Come, come, we are
not here to enjoy ourselves.’
De Gourmont has gone—
Blandula, tenulla, vagula—
almost with a jest on his lips, for his satire on M. Croquant et la Guerre
continues in the current Mercure.
423

Marianne Moore and Mina Loy’
of Mina Loy I detect no emotion whatever. Both of these women
are, possibly in unconsciousness, among the followers of Jules La-
forgue (whose work shows a great deal of emotion). It is possible, as I
have written, or intended to writeelsewhere, to divide poetry into three
sorts; (1.) melopoeia, to wit, poetry which moves by its music, whether
it be a music in the words or an aptitude for, or suggestion of, accom-
panying music; (2.) imagism, or poetry wherein the feelings of paint-
ing and sculpture are predominant (certain men move in phantas-
magoria; the images of their gods, whole countrysides, stretches of
hill land and forest, travel with them); and there is, thirdly, logopoeia
or poetry that is akin to nothing but language, which is a dance of
the intelligence among words and ideas and modification of ideas and
characters. Pope and the eighteenth-century writers had in this
medium a certain limited range. The intelligence of Laforgue ran
through the whole gamut of his time. T. S. Eliot has gone on with it.
Browning wrote a condensed form of drama, full of things of the
senses, scarcely ever pure logopoeia.
One wonders what the devil anyone will make of this sort of thing
who has not in their wit all the clues. It has none of the stupidity be-
loved of the ‘lyric’ enthusiast and the writer and reader who take
refuge in scenery description of nature, because they are unable to
cope with the human. These two contributors to the ‘Others’ Anthol-
ogy write logopoeia. It is, in their case, the utterance of clever people
in despair, or hovering upon the brink of that precipice. It is of those
who have acceded with Renan ‘La bétise humaine est la seule chose
qui donne une idée de l'infini.’ It is a mind cry, more than a heart
cry. ‘Take the world if thou wilt but leave me an asylum for my
affection’ is not their lamentation, but rather ‘In the midst of this
desolation, give me at least one intelligence to converse with.’
The arid clarity, not without its own beauty, of le tempérament de
l'Americaine, is in the poems of these, I think, graduates or post-
graduates, If they have not received B.A.’s or M.A.‘s or B.Sc—s they do
not need them.
The point of my praise, for I intend this as praise, even if 1 do not
burst into the phrases of Victor Hugo, is that without any pretences
and without clamours about nationality, these girls have written a
| n the verse of Marianne Moore I detect traces of emotion; in that
* From a review of ‘Others’, [Anthology for 1917], part of A List of Books, The
Little Review, March 1918.
424

MARIANNE MOORE
distinctly national product, they have written something which would
not have come out of any other country, and (while I have before
now seen a deal of rubbish by both of them) they are, as selected by
Mr. Kreymborg, interesting and readable (by me, that is. I am aware
that even the poems before me would drive numerous not wholly
unintelligent readers into a fury of rage-out-of-puzzlement.)

Wyndham Lewis at the Goupil’
r. Lewis’ picture of the Gun Pit is one of the few outstanding
works at the Canadian War Records exhibit, but his draw-
ings now at the Goupil Gallery are an advance on the paint-
ing, or else the painting is a retrogression from the drawings, one of
which appears to be a more personal study for the left lower corner of
the big picture,
As Mr. Lewis implies in his preface to the catalogue, there are two
ways of regarding ‘war paintings’; first, as paintings (vide Mr. Lewis’
remarks about Uccello); secondly, as illustrations of war (vide Mr.
Lewis’ remarks about Goya); as ‘paintings’ Mr. Lewis’ drawings are
about the most successful war show we have had. There are fragmen-
tary drawings like the detail of mechanism of the camouflaged gun,
a mere study; there are intermediary states, and there are fully
finished works like the drawings of gun-pits; works which can be
submitted to all the criteria. These works are signally free from the
violence which characterised Mr. Lewis’ pre-war productions, The
artist is the antidote for the multitude. At least, there is antidotal art,
whether one approves it or no. There is also art which needs antidotes.
Mr. Lewis’ art does not. The drawings in this exhibit could, most of
them, hang in one’s study without palling. This means that they are
well composed, well constructed, and harmonious in their colour
schemes.
What are called the tactile, but should be called the lift-ile values
are excellent. I mean there is definite proof of anatomic skill in the
degrees of tenseness of the various figures: the men, particularly the
centre man, lifting the short balks preparatory to building the gun-
pit; the men hauling the gun; the larger figures pulling on the rope (40)
all display the different, the quite different mechanical or physical
strain of their attitudes; and this expression or exposure of bodily
capability is shown by the artist with the fine graduation of a master.
The layman will be hard put to tell you just why each figure expresses
such a strain: the per-kilo, per-foot pressure in each instance. That is
to say, the strain is exposed with great economy of means, So also is the
devitalisation of the wounded as they return over their duck-boards.
By subtle gradations we come out of the technical problems of
composition into the problems of ‘drawing’, and thence into the illus-
trational qualities: man the alert animal peeping dog-like out of his
protective burrow, nosing danger.
1 The New Age, 20 February 1919.
426

WYNDHAM LEWIS AT THE GOUPIL
Another property of Mr. Lewis’ work is its ‘partialness', | mean that
every series of the three series of Lewis’ drawings I have seen appears to
be the beginning of some exposition which might go on indefinitely
for the rest of the artist's life. (In two cases it has been continued by
imitators.)
There seems no reason why Mr. Lewis should not go on for years
unrolling the panorama of artillery labour, phase by phase of the
operations; there is a complete world of the matter; just as there was
a complete possible world of violent or impassive forms suggested by
his ‘Timon’; or by drawings at the old Doré Gallery in 1914. The pre—
sent show is manifestly only one corner of Mr. Lewis. But it is no
function of mine to speculate about potentialities. I am here merely
to find the good in each show as it opens regardless of ‘school’,
whether it be Mr. Nicholson's conscientious still life; or Mr. Geo.
Belcher’s gratuitous labour in refining his tones for drawings that will
be made mediocre in weekly reproductions. Mr. Lewis’ show is of no
particular school; it touches his vorticist work at one corner, and
Uccello or Signorelli, or perhaps Kunisada at another, One should
perhaps run over to the National Gallery to discover just which primi-
tive it should ‘recall’ to one's memory. There is, or was, the little Judas
in or near the front hall; and various other scenes of the crucifixion.
Before the renaissance there were simplifications and eliminations
quite as ‘revolutionary’ as any we shall find at the Goupil. But I
cannot see that these early Italians were more satisfactory.
It also appears to me a sign of resource that a man known chiefly
as a revolutionary inventor of forms, and what his adherents termed
‘forms in combination’, should now appear as a narrative painter with
an apparently unlimited subject-matter, a capacity for suggesting
unlimited subject-matter. I think the readers of The New Age have by
now become reconciled to Matisse, Brancusi, Picasso, or, at least, to
Van Gogh, Gaudier, Cézanne. Ido not think the majority will find the
present work of Wyndham Lewis ‘too advanced’. There is, from the
purely aesthetic point of view, a calm pleasure to be derived from
clear tones, the cold air, the desolation of the Ypres Salient, with the
pyramidal arrangement of three men in the wilderness. The sketches
in the entrance room lose nothing by comparison with Turner's
water-colours. Those who ragged Mr. Lewis five years ago for his
cubism, futurism, vorticism, and so forth, will vainly seek for the old
points of attack in these drawings. My own preference is for the rough,
spirited oil painting, ‘To Wipe Out’; here the purely optical effects of
shell-burst and of battle are fused with emotional expression. The
figures in the lower right-hand corner are, I think, more satisfactory
than even the pink-shirted nigger in the Canadian War Records
picture, I would draw attention to the forms in 11, to the ‘Walking
Wounded’ (No. 17), to the treatment of combined figures in 29, to the
427

LUNITEMIPURARIES
concentration of force, to the gun-mouth in 19, to the detail of 52;
and my aim in this article has been to suggest that Nos. 11, 17, 32, 36,
39, 40, 41, 43, 45, 47, 53, are the best art that has ‘come out of the war’;
but they have come a good deal more out of art; out of art's resistance
to war, than out of war's much-vaunted ‘effect upon art’. Indeed,
Mr. Lewis would seem to suggest that art is a cut above war; that art
might even outlast it,
428

Hudson: Poet Strayed into Science’
| udson's art begins where any man’s art is felicitous in begin-
ning: in an enthusiasm for his subject matter. If we begin
with The Naturalist in La Plata we may find almost no ‘art!
whatever; there are impassioned passages, naive literary homages,
and much unevenness and a trace of rhetoric in the writing. The
Shepherd's Life must, at the other end of the scale, be art of a very high
order; how otherwise would one come completely under the spell of
a chapter with no more startling subject matter than the cat at a rural
station of an undistinguished British provincial railway.
Hudson is an excellent example of Coleridge’s theorem ‘the miracle
that can be wrought’ simply by one man’s feeling something more
keenly, or knowing it more intimately than it has been, before, known.
The poet's eye and comprehension are evident in the first pages of
The Naturalist: the living effigies in bronze rising out of the white sea
of the pampas. Then the uneven eloquence:
“And with the rhea go the flamingo, antique and splendid; and
the swans in their bridal plumage; and the rufous tinamou-sweet
and mournful melodist of the eventide; and the noble crested
screamer. .., These, and the other large avians, together with the
finest of its mammalians, will shortly be lost to the pampas
utterÌy.‘...
. . . ‘What a wail there would be in the world if a sudden destruc—
tion were to fall on the accumulated art—treasures of the National
Gallery, and the marbles in the British Museum, and the contents
of the King’s Library—the old prints and mediaeval illuminations!
And these are only the work of human hands and brains—impres-
sions of individual genius on perishable material, immortal only in
the sense that the silken cocoon of the dead moth is so, because they
continue to exist and shine when the artist's hands and brain are
dust: and man has the long day of life before him in which to do
again things like these, and better than these, if there is any truth in
evolution. But the forms of life in the two higher vertebrate classes
are Nature’s most perfect work; and the life of even a single species
is of incalculably greater value to mankind, for what it teaches and
would continue to teach, than all the chiselled marbles and painted
canvases the world contains; though doubtless there are many
1 The Little Review, May-June 1920,
429

CONTEMPORARIES
persons who are devoted to art, but blind to some things greater
than art, who will set me down as a Philistine for saying so.
‘And, above all others, we should protect and hold sacred those
types, Nature's masterpieces, which are first singled out for destruc-
tion on account of their size, or splendour, or rarity, and that false
detestable glory which is accorded to their successful slayers. In
ancient times the spirit of life shone brightest in these; and when
others that shared the earth with them were taken by death, they
were left, being more worthy of perpetuation.’
One may put aside quibbles of precedence, whatever the value of
evidence of man’s fineness, and in an age of pestilence like our own
there is little but the great art of the past to convince one that the
human species deserves to continue; there can be no quarrel between
the archaeologist who wishes to hear the ‘music of the lost dynasty’,
or the gracious tunes of the Albigeois, and the man who is so filled
with a passion of the splendour of wild things, of wild birds which:
‘Like immortal flowers have drifted down to us on the ocean of
time . , .and their strangeness and beauty bring to our imaginations
a dream and a picture of that unknown world, immeasurably far
removed, where man was not; and when they perish, something of
gladness goes out from nature, and the sunshine loses something
of its brightness.’
‘The voice is authentic, It is the priesthood of nature. Yet if an an-
thropologist may speak out of his pages to the ‘naturalist’, itis not only
the bird and furred beast that suffer. A bloated usury, a cowardly and
snivelling politics, a disgusting financial system, the sadistic curse of
Christianity work together, not only that an hundred species of wild
fowl and beast shall give way before the advance of industry, i.e., that
the plains be covered with uniform and verminous sheep, bleating in
perfect social monotony; but in our alleged ‘society’ the same ten-
dencies and the same urge that the bright plumed and the fine voiced
species of the genus anthropos, the favoured of the gods, the only
part of humanity worth saving, is attacked. The milkable human
cows, the shearable human sheep are invited by the exploiters, and all
other regarded as caput lupinum, dangerous: lest the truth should shine
out in art, which ceases to be art and degenerates into religion and
cant and superstition as soon as it has tax-gathering priests; lest works
comparable to the Cretan vases and Assyrian lions should be reproduced
and superseded.
There is no quarrel between the artist and Mr. Hudson, and he is
right in saying that there would be more ‘wail’ over the destruction
of the British Museum than over the destruction of wild species. Yet
how little the ‘public’ cares for either. And how can it be expected to
430

HUDSON: POET STRAYED INTO SCIENCE
care so long as so much of it is ‘at starvation level’, so long as men
are taught that work isa virtue rather than enjoyment and so long as
men render lip service to a foul institution which has perpetuated the
writing of Tertullien and of men who taught that the human body is
evil.
As long as ‘Christendom’ is permeated with the superstition that
the human body is tainted and that the senses are not noble avenues
of ‘illumination’, where is the basis of a glory in the colour-sense
without which the birds-wings are unapprehended, or of audition
without which the bell-cry of the crested screamers is only a noise in
the desert.
‘Their strangeness and their beauty’ may well go unheeded into
desuetude if there be nothing to preserve them but usurers and the
slaves of usury and an all religion which has taught the supreme
lie that the splendour of the δει is not a true splendour, that it is
not the garment of the gods; and which has glorified the vilest of
human imaginations, the pit of the seven great stenches, and which
still teaches the existence of this hell as a verity for the sake of scaring
little children and stupid women and of collecting dues and maintain-
ing its —.
My anger has perhaps carried me away from Hudson who should
have been my subject; yet his anger is germane to it. Mediaeval
Christianity had one merit, it taught that usury was an evil. But in
our day Rockefeller and the churches eat from the one manger, and
the church has so far fallen into vacuity that it does not oppose
‘finance’, which is nothing but a concatenation of usuries, hardly
subtle, but subtle enough to gull the sheep and cow humans.
And for the same system man is degraded, and the wild beasts
destroyed. So I have perhaps not lost my subject after all, but only
extended my author's exordium.
The foregoing paragraphs can hardly be taken as introduction to
Mr. Hudson’s quiet charm. He would lead us to South America;
despite the gnats and mosquitoes we would all perform the voyage
for the sake of meeting a puma, Chimbica, friend of man, the most
loyal of wildeats, And, as 1am writing this presumably for an audience,
more or less familiar with my predilections, familiar with my loathing
of sheep, my continual search for signs of intelligence in the human
race, it should be some indication of Hudson’s style that it has carried
even me through a volume entitled A Shepherd's Life, a title which has
no metaphorical bearing, but deals literally with the subject indicated.
‘Caleb's shepherding period in Doveton came to a somewhat
sudden conclusion. It was nearing the end of August and he was
beginning to think about the sheep which would have to be taken
431

CONTEMPORARIES
to the “Castle” sheep-fair on 5th October, and it appeared strange
to him,’ etc.
John B. Yeats has written somewhere: ‘I found that I was interested
in the talk, not of those who told me interesting things, so much as of
those who were by natural gift truthful tellers’; a phrase which is as
good a qualification of Hudson's work as I can find. Hudson's books
are indeed full of interesting things, of interesting ‘information’, yet
it is all information which could, like all information whatsoever,
have been made dull in the telling. But the charm is in Hudson's
sobriety. I doubt if, apart from the Mayor of Casterbridge, and The Noble
Dames, and the best of Hardy, there is anything so true to the English
countryside as Hudson's picture. F, M. Hueffer must not be forgotten;
there is his Heart of the Country, and passages in other of his books
to maintain the level; and Hueffer is perhaps at his best when he
approaches most closely to Hudson’s subject matter; when he is least
clever, when he is most sober in his recording of country life.
This is not however an arranging of hierarchies and an awarding
of medals for merit, Hudson touches Hueffer when dealing with
England and Cunninghame Graham in dealing with La Plata. And it
is very foolish to wail over the decadence of English letters merely
a some of the best work of these three men is possibly ten years
old.
Tt is perhaps faddism and habit that causes people still to gossip of
Poe, when *E] Ombu’ has been written, not as a grotesque but as
tragic elegy, as the ordered telling of life as it must have happened.
And then Poe's prose? Poe’s prose is as good as Hudson’s in places,
and Hudson is indubitably uneven; relieved if not by hokkus at least
by the sense of the ‘special moment’ which makes the hokku: thus
his trees like images of trees in black stone.
This image-sense is an enrichment, perhaps ‘dangerous’ to the unity
of his style, but very welcome to the lover of revelation. And to
balance it there is the latent and never absent humour as in ‘Marta
Riquelme’.
“What is, is; and if you talk until tomorrow you can not make it
different, although you may prove yourself a very learned person.’
432

Jean Cocteau Sociologist’
he livest thing in Paris 1933 was Jean Cocteau. A dark inner
room, no clatter of outside Paris, He talked, I should say
almost without interruption for two hours and over, with
never a word that wouldn’t have been good reading. I mean with
never a bit of gossip, never a triviality, nothing but thought about
matters of interest to more than the two people present.
By contrast Louis Aragon was simply distressed that the Surrealist
movement was being blown to bits by mere personal squabbles in no
way connected with thought, in no way connected with art, writing
or politics.
The post-war boys in France were a set of orphans in the worst sense
of the term. After the death of Gourmont there was no elder writer
whom they could respect. War blew up a lot of clichés. Patriotism in
the service of a set of escroes does not conduce to respect for one’s
elders, for tradition, for sanctified verbal formulations.
Among the mature French writers there was no one to stand by.
France was worse off than England. It might be pointed out that the
Shaw-Wells-Bennett line have Not founded a group for the same
reasons that Barrés and the rest of em have not done so. They haven't
had any cause wherewith young men could form an alliance. And on
that ground Orage was immeasurably their superior though, as I have
said before, it will take the public some time to discover it.
A man’s writing is his own. But his principles are shareable treasure.
Cocteau is so essentially a writer-so probably the FIRST continental
writer, apart from a few late lapidary and practically unknown prose
paragraphs of D’Annunzio, that no one has yet mentioned his con-
tents.
The eterna freschezza that we would all like to attain, seems so weight-
less that no one considers its strength.
With no disrespect to the distinction of ‘M. Teste’, a writer can't live
thirty years on the reputation of one prose sketch, and apart from
‘M. Teste’ and a few professorial studies, better done than those of the
average American fresh water professor, because France is a more
civilised country, and neat finishing more habitual in Paris than in
Peoria, one wonders what, in the last balance and weighing, Paul
Valéry has to set against the sheer bulk of Cocteau’s writing. There is
1 The New English Weekly, 10 January 1935.
433

CONTEMPORARIES
some very pretty verse in the very much manner of Mallarmé, but
why all this spate of critical jabber, in every half-baked English
or American magazine, about the French academician, in contrast
to the extreme difficulty of getting Cocteau published in trans-
lation ?!
True, we had the same difficulty about Rémy de Gourmont, and
Cocteau is a better writer than Gourmont.
Possibly a feminine reader hit the mark with: ‘But it is MucH too
fine, of course they will never get it.’
Nevertheless in asking a proportionate estimate of Cocteau against
a number of writers who recently received high consideration, it
might be well to consider both the bulk of his writing, and its nobility.
Tam aware that the public’s Cocteau is the Cocteau of Marie Lauren-
cin’s portrait, the exquisite, the wing of the rarest possible moth. But
are we expected to stop at the Cocteau of yesterday, Cocteau of ‘Le
Mor?
Among writers, may we be permitted the privilege of weighing a
writer who writts, while other bookmakers are ‘joining’, ‘adopting’,
preaching pacifism, without inspecting economics, ‘turning’, com-
munist, bolshevik, or this, that and the other arrer the battles—oh yes,
usually, in fact almost always, arrer the victories.
Cocteau’s writings include: Poésie (a good, full volume), Opéra,
Heurtebise, Le Potomac, Le Grand Ecart, Thomas I'Imposteur, Les
Enfants Terribles, six volumes of criticism that no one else could have
written, Antigone, (Edipe Roi, Orphée, La Voix Humaine, La Machine
Infernale, and various works with musicians.
That is to say as writer, and nothing else but writer, apart from being
a unique perceptive intelligence (as shown in his criticism) we have
three novels that are not any other man’s novels, We have an unique
contribution to drama that fs but one living competitor, the author
of Six Characters in Search of an Author, and we have perhaps the one living
dramatist hom Pirandello reaps with respect.
Pirande.io was concerned, while Cocteau was writing Œdipe, for Coc—
teau‘s danger of tackling that subject without a plop into Freud, or it
may have been only a passing thought that floated up over the lun-
cheon table, in brief conversation, but it ended with the Italian's shrug:
‘no, on the whole no, he won't fall into Freudian mess. Il est trop bon
poéte.”
Which is emphatically true. Cocteau is the one man who can do,
and has done things in the theatre which are beyond Pirandello’s
capacity. There is a rigour in Cocteau that has not been in Pirandello,
+ le Mystére Laie, translated by Olga appeared in Agenda (Volume 2, Nos.
Rudge, appeared in New Directions I in 23, December-January 1960-61),
1916. E. P. Ed.
Alan Neame‘s translation of Lésne
434

JEAN COCTEAU SOCIOLOGIST
at least not since the Six Characters, and Cocteau’s force is so different
that there is no profit in comparison. Thank God for both authors in
an otherwise rather desolate stage-scape.
Cocteau has the freest mind, and the purest, in Europe; I mean if
you can carry up your thought to the nous, to the mind of the world
AS MIND, and not a secretion of tissues.
Living writers attain nobility? Indeed! and how many. Yeats has
a sort of nobility in his somewhat clouded way, in his language that
is the speech of no man. But neither Yeats nor Pirandello could attain
the: “T’as inventé la justice.’ in Cocteau’s Antigone.
Tam stufo and arcistufo, j'en ai diablement marre, archimarre, 1 call on Jarry
to express me with an extra ‘r’ in his favourite expletive. I am fed u p
(up) with young idiots who can’t see that history does not exist with-
out economics; who do not know that Bithinian mortgages at 12 per
cent are a matter of history; who think that any man can understand
history in the book, without economics, or that 'Phistoire morale’ can
ε on without economics any more than any other department of
istory, or that literature keeps its head in a bag.
A writer’s awareness to relations is vastly other than an impulse to
write treatises. I write treatises because I am a species of pachyderm,
Tama porter of teak, lama beast of burden because the circumjacent
literati are weaklings, they are piffling idiots that can’t get on with the
job, they can not even write text books. It is necessary to start in the
grammar schools, and I can type for eight hours a day.
It is necessary for me to dig the ore, melt it, smelt it, to cut the
wood and the stone, because Iam surrounded by ten thousand
nincompoops and nothing fit to call an American civilisation or
a British civilisation; but that is no reason for Cocteau's writing
treatises.
There is every reason for his providing something for mE to
read,
The more a man knows, oh well, no use my trying to write that,
Gourmont has done it. ‘Rien ne pousse 4 la concision comme l‘abon—
dance des idées,’
Nothing conduces to limpidity so much as does perfect acquain-
tance. Nothing has been more use to Cocteau than domesticity with
the Greek language.
If it hadn't been the Greek drama something else would have served
him, but the Greek tancuace need not be confused with Greek drama.
No man has ever been less likely to get spattered with the kind of mud
I have had for 25 years slung at my head. Cocteau knows enough
Greek, so that it passes unnoticed. At least I suppose so. As to Greek
drama, before Cocteau had published any, Eliot and I looked over the
ground, This is no place to say what we thought of it. But it is, per-
missably, a place to register the fact that we pip nothing about it,
435

CONTEMPORARIES
except possibly form a few critical opinions that we wouldn't have had,
if we hadn’t prodded and poked at father AEschylus.!
Cocteau has brought not a resuscitated old corpse, but an ephébe
out of the sepulchre, with a young step and a living language.
‘Alors, si Fidée de fantóme te fait sauter en Pair, c'est que tout le
monde, riche ou pauvre & Thebes, sauf quelques gros légumes* qui
profitent de tout...’
That is language full charged with meaning. It has in it indeed the
whole political wisdom of the past two decades and it has Nor penetrated
the skulls of ten dozen people. Orage has written it time and again,
I have written it less often than he did, and I have been quoted by
brother Munson as having enlightened his darkness, and 1 have,
without any false modesty, enlightened several coagulations of dark-
ness, but I have not done half so well as Jean Cocteau. There ts a
French civilisation. Flaubert is a good deal or French civilisation.
Flaubert's books are considered, by half-wits, too heavy. For example,
Pére Rouault’s letter has a whole life on a page.
Compare that texture with Cocteau’s. It will take a decade’s teaching
to make people, once they have understood why Flaubert’s weight is of
tremendous importance, understand that you can have a great light-
ness. Cf. Henry Ford on the idiocy of making railway trains extra
heavy. The bottom of p. 22 in La Machine Infernale, has a condensation
equal to Flaubert's,
“Guerre c'est déja pas dróle, mais crois-tu que c’est un sport que de
se battre contre un ennemi qu'on ne connait pas. On commence a en
avoir soupé des oracles, des joyeuses victimes et des méres admirables.’
A writer's greatness can, in certain dimensions, be measured by the
amount of his time he contains.
It is time we stopped tolerating discussion of Cocteau as a mere
society writer, and, if we have any respect for our own critical estim-
ates, it is time we placed him where he belongs, certainly above all
living French academicians, certainly in the rank with his peers,
however few of them be still living.
‘Pound translated — Sophokles' # Quoted in Canto LXXXVII, Ed,
Women of Trackis in 1954 (Faber paper-
covered editions, 1970). Ed.
436

Obituary: A. R. Orage’
HE PULLED HIS WEIGHT
he sudden death of Orage at this time, on the day after his
broadcast, is a graver loss to England than to his oldest friends,
For a forty years’ war on evil no man stood his equal in Britain.
During two longish stretches of that fight there were probably a
dozen other men who each thought he stood nearest to him. I can
only say that for one period we seemed almost to get out the old New
Age between us, and that the small dissident minority who profess to
get some profit from my writings owe debt, above whatever they
realise, to the man whose weekly guinea fed me when no one else
was ready to do so, and that for at least two years running.
The public's loss will be more apparent to them in ten years’ time
than today.
The actual battle with ignorance, in the acute phase wherein |
shared, began with Douglas's arrival in Cursitor Street. The earlier
Guild Socialism, and all other political or social theory had lain out-
side my view, (This statement is neither boast nor apology.) I take it
I was present at some of the earliest talks between the two leaders. At
any rate my economic study dates from their union, and their fight
for its place in public knowledge.
A selfless fight. A fight that should have brought them inter—
national recognition far sooner. The resistance to Douglas’s ideas was
the greatest incentive. I think I could say, it was so to all of us.
Orage’s impersonality was his greatness, and the breadth of his mind
was apparent in the speed with which he threw over acumbrous lot of
superstitions, and a certain number of fairly good ideas, for a new set
of better ones.
But it was the gag that aroused one. Why, if Douglas was right,
should people be afraid of discussing him or his formulations?
I take it that in 30 years of journalism Orage never printed a line he
didn't believe. This is not the year nor the decade when England can
spare that sort of honesty.
During 21 years, I think that Orage never admired a single author
whom I admired, and that, in my own work, he liked only that part
which differentiates me from the living writers whom I have respected
1 The New English Weekly, 15 November 1934.
437

COUNTEMIORARIES
or eulogised. The sole exception was, during the last year or so, Carlos
Williams. | mean that our 23 years’ friendship was a friendship of
literary differences and never one difference concealed.
In economics we had but one divergence, namely re. the expediency of
Gesselite demurrage money or stamp scrip. As to the corporate state,
I believe differences were more a matter of time and location than of
any root disagreement. He died exactly one month after the speech to
the Milan workers. It was natural that he should not see this in the
same light that I do, or rather that he should have estimated it differ-
ently, as a victory, certainly, but perhaps not yet fully as the great and
final collapse of Scarcity Economics. Monday night his voice came over
the radio, curiously gentle and patient, without the fire I had known
or the sharp snap and crack of the sentences, but very clear, as the
transmission was mostly good, though the last sentence went with a
crackle (thunder probably in the Alps).
He had written to me during the last year when his hand was weary
from physical labour of writing. A dozen others must have known the
same thing, and known that he had a specific sense of his mission, That
both he and I were fatigued should be apparent from an egregious
typing error in the last issue, that I should have written it, from
fatigue, and, as I had no proofs in Rapallo, that he should have passed
it, warned me that I needed rest, but he, apparently, did not take
similar warning.
On Oct. 24. Three opponents ‘had reconsidered’,
On Oct. 10, writing to me of the Duce’s Milan speech he was:
“Not satisfied that he (Mussolini) sees any alternative to Employment
as the only legitimate title to purchasing power.’
That letter ends ‘perhaps I write not for men but for God!
“Yours ever, A. R. Onace.’
ΚΩ full signature, as valediction, where he signed normally with
initials.
Orage’s superiority over the men of his decade and over the promin-
ent or protuberant public figures and writers a decade or so older than
himself was that he pulled his weight. In an age of funking abuleia, of
passing the buck, he never waited for cats to jump, he never shirked
the responsibility of forming an opinion. Shirking of that kind is fundamentally
the technique of certain gross forms of worldly success. It is so easy to
profess ignorance, it is so cravenly easy to keep ignorance real.
That is why I say that the public, which never knew Orage at his
full size, will take another ten years to discover what is now missing,
The present government of the United States will have lost its most
faithful foreign critic,
Its domestic critics can be divided mainly into corrupt reaction-
438

OBITUARY: A, R. ORAGE
aries, the slime of the Hoover, Mellon, McCormick, Patterson con-
tingent, howling for usury, and the sloppy half-baked liberalistic bally-
hoo of the semi-ignorant backers of the Administration, trying to
apply the Saturday Evening Post methods to not very sage aspiration.
Precisely the focus of thought, and the focus of information that
was in the weekly notes of this paper, will have disappeared.
However much one may have pee against the rigidity of
Orage’s viewpoint, the function of that rigidity, of its inestimable
utility became clear whenever one, over a period of weeks or months,
compared it with the waftier and less stable editorial policies of more
‘tolerant’ advanced papers.
In thought as in warfare, you must have both scouts, and fixed
positions and bases. Orage’s very obstinacy constituted a value.
Douglasites grouped in England may know what they mean to do
next, or Douglasites gathered into groups anywhere may have a
definite line of project, but the scattered social creditors who kept in
touch with the movement via The New English Weekly will be, at least
temporarily, ‘taken aback’, not knowing whether the captain is dead
in the moment of victory assured, or if an aggregate of individuals,
with more or less common belief, but with no cohering organisation,
and no capacity for concerted action is left scattered, and drifting.
This is no time for a burial service, It is a time to rally and to get on
with the work: A concentration and reprint of the pith of Orage‘s
economic writings, as soon as possible.
And for the training of a later generation, a biography. For a man
who writes ‘books’, biography matters nothing, but for the publicist
and combatant the lesson is in the relation of the act and the word to
its time. Only when that act of weighing has been performed will the
outer public judge Orage in full bulk,
439

In the Wounds"
(MEMORIAM A. R, ORAGE)
either the great public, nor the very small public that can
afford to pay 7s. 6d, at a shot for its magazines will under-
stand the significance of Orage's death, or be able to answer
the question: “Who was Orage?’ until they understand the ideas to
which he devoted the last fifteen years of his life:
A. In themselves.
B. In relation to the living economic ideas of this decade and the
known and undeniable facts of history, the more significant among
which are usually concealed from the public, almost never taught by
hired professors of either history or economics and often ignored by
the very people to whom the poor ape of a public entrusts its most
vital affairs, i.e. M.P.’s, members of ‘brain trusts’, presidents of republics,
directors of great financial houses and their most advertised and pro-
jecting trained seals.
C. In relation to the gross ignorance in which my generation and
yours and our fathers’ generation have been reared and in which the
generation that followed mine was very largely killed off.
A couple of years ago 1 had the unpleasant experience of hearing
Leon Blum drool for forty-five minutes to the Paris Press Club, Before
I could ask him whether his ignorance and his party’s ignorance of
modern economics was real or pretended, Bill Bird had asked him a
technical question, and by the time he had finished evading that
question (twenty-two minutes) Sparrow Robertson and the other
pressmen present would certainly have assassinated any private guest
who had given Leon an excuse for further verbal manifestation. Blum
isno more disgustingly ignorant than 80 per cent of French, American,
and even British ministers, members, senators and their managers.
Proudhon will be found somewhere in the foundations of perhaps
all contemporary economic thought that has life in it. Plenty of people
know in vague way that Orage ‘started as a guild socialist’ and perhaps
that Mussolini did likewise, but clear ideas of what guild socialism
was when either O. or M, started, are uncommon. Both men found it
advisable to move on. I see three living varieties of economic thought.
The idea of the corporate state has already entered the domain of
action on the grand scale, Gesellism has been tried docally and suc-
ceeded,
‘ The Criterion, April 1935; Impact (Regnery, 1960).
440

IN THE WOUNDS
Douglasism went to the polls for the first time in the autumn of
1934, in Australia. And itis with Douglasism that Orage was concerned.
‘Social Credit’ and ‘New Democracy’ give weekly and fortnightly
counsel to the converted and nearly-converted and to people who
know a little about it. I will try to write the next few pages for those
who know nothing,
Sometime in 1918 or thereabouts an ex-engineer, ex-head of Westing-
house's Indian branch, then managing an airplane factory noticed
that his factory was creating prices faster than it emitted the power to
buy.
Say that in a month the factory produced £20,000 ‘worth’ of air-
planes, but distributed only £17,000 as purchasing power, in wages,
dividends, etc. Douglas saw that if his factory was doing so, all other
successful factories must be doing so in greater or less degree. If factories
don't, they go ‘bust’,
Dexter Kimball's figures as to the percentage of business failure, the
history of American railways, the long muddled and much graphed
and charted ‘problem of the cycle of crisis’ are all cloquent footnotes
to which any serious person can refer. Anyone whose mind is capable
of receiving impressions from exterior objects, and of correlating the
mental stimulae so received, should be able to follow the process of
the Major's thought after he made this observation-i.e, a concrete
observation of the fact in his own factory.
Orage recently made a pregnant remark on thermo-dynamics, the
‘second law of thermodynamics’ whereby you cannot unscramble
s.
ὋΣ the devotee of algebra, six eggs scrambled may equal six eggs
unscrambled. There exist also several printed volumes on purely
mathematical fallacies,
The Major's first observation is on a par with the observation of the
falling apple or of the kettle lid lifted by steam: a point of departure.
People have asserted that they ‘haven't seen it’. The factories where
it does not occur, gradually disappear if it continues not occurring
for a longer period than they can stand its non-occurrence, No one, so
far as I know, has attempted to disprove this part of Douglasism either to
Douglas, to Orage or to the present writer by the simple presentation
of the accounts of a firm.
President Roosevelt got as far as saying ‘if half a nation can’t buy
what the other half produces’ but he refuses, or has up to date refused,
to look at the impasse presented when ‘the whole of a nation cannot
buy what the whole nation produces’,
He is the shiftiest great politician (as distinct from mere cheats and
scoundrels) that I can, for the moment think of. The moral cowardice
of failing to look at this problem is not quite commensurable by the
political expedience or ‘political craft’ implied. Hence the murmur
441

LUNIEMEDRARNIEO
that he is sold up the river to Governor Lehman's friends (true or
false, as may be).
Douglas's perception was that nnder the present accounting system
the public's purchasing power can never catch up with prices, and that
the actual money available can never buy all the goods available.
Anybody can or should be able to see the millions of people, ten
millions in Britain, twenty millions in America now unable to buy
half of what they want or even a decent percentage of what they
need.
This objective fact apparently does not penetrate the minds of states-
men and bankers. It merely skims over the greasy pate and causes a
transient uncasiness.
Orage's last words over the radio, emerging for Rapallo from the
crackle of Alpine thunder were: ‘in the gap between Price-values and
Income is enough gunpowder to blow up every democratic parlia-
ment’.
Admit. That was a fine sentence to die on.
Mussoliniis erecting an assembly more representative than the old model
parliament, he is working against the ‘gap’ by a human Italian system,
which he has himself stated was not ‘an article for export’, all of which
needn't prevent the intelligent foreigner from learning the truth about
Italy, or perhaps acquiring a little of Italy’s cultural heritage. Europe
has twice before done so, with advantage.
Douglasism proposes to start bridging the gap from a different
position. Anyone who thinks out the results of the accounting system
now raging will see that the deficiency of purchasing power is not static,
but that the gulf is constantly widening,
The idiocy of mere spasmodic dumping of purchasing power, ought
to be visible. Douglas proposes an irrigation system.
The main complaint is: where will the state get the money to pay
dividends? Why isn’t it merely ‘persistent, never-ending inflation’?
For Douglasism (itself part of a thought-heritage) proposes to distri-
bute purchasing power to the public via national dividends, And this
strikes some people as absurd, or at least as impossible.
These same people often receive dividends from their ‘investments
in industrial or national bonds’. They often read in newspapers that
‘government subsidies have been granted’ or that ‘doles’, etc., are
being provided or that ‘relief’ is provided. But the spectacle of nations
pouring out purchasing power by the million through specific grants,
emergency measures and as ‘charity’ causes no mental cohesion, or no
mental activity based on the convergence and interactions of thoughts.
People know that most money is paper, or they don’t know it, and
are unable so to consider it, The Macmillan Commission admits that
banks create money. Bank-defenders admit that nine-tenths of all
money is ‘bank money’, The idea that most purchasing power exists
442

IN THE WOUNDS
either as engraved paper or as entries in account-books is too diaphan-
ous to take root in the public comprehension,
Money is a ‘representation of something else’, it is or ought to be the
representation of something solid.
It ought to be the representation of something solid and deliverable or
else of available service (like a ride on the railway or tramcar). Under
the present oppression it is often the representation of a mere airy
probability (called by its exploiters ‘sound banking’ or ‘sound finance’
or ‘orthodox economics’).
Apart from the deliberate cheats and fools, men of goodwill and
partial enlightenment often do honestly wonder whence the state could
draw its power to pay continual dividends (i.e. distribute pieces of
engraved paper with a certain regularity) without going bankrupt.
To explain this one is tempted to reach backward into the chasm of
history. Once usury was condemmed by the Church's high wisdom, to
the same hell with Sodom, as ‘contrary to natural increase’.
But the Church sanctioned the ‘increment of association’.
It was a black day for Europe when this distinction was lost. It was
also a dull day for England zc Insularity raged so that Gourmont’s
writings on the Dissociation of Ideas failed to receive proper attention,
simply as method in thinking.
When small merchants could not fill each one his own ship, they
banded together, and shared in marine adventure, both peril and
profit. When savages hunted, they now and again hunted in bands.
A group of men acting together can, in some circumstance achieve
more than the sum of the possible attainments of the same hundred
men acting each on his own.
The difference between these sums, is the ‘increment of association’.
That increment is essential in the comprehension of the Douglas
plan, for which A, R. Orage gave his life.
Five thousand Basutos cannot sling a Baldwin locomotive forty feet
into the air, and put it down gently on the other side of a factory.
When men associate not only with other live men, but with the
aggregate of all acquired skills and inventions, the increment of
association with all these skills and inventions adds another dimension to
the ‘increment of association’ an increment so enormous that popular
imagination is still incapable of understanding it, and many people are
still scared, as of a bogey man,
1 Definitions. Increment of association : ciation with all past inventiveness,
Advantage men get from working thus, crops from improved seed;
together instead of each on his own, American wheat after Carleton’s
eg. crew that can work a ship researches; a few men hoisting a
whereas the men separately couldn't locomotive with machinery. Social
sail ships each on his own. Credit: An Impact, 1935. Ed.
Cultural heritage: Increment of asso-
443

CONTEMPORARIES
This new incrementis the ‘cultural heritage’ of Douglas's economics.
Mere work is no longer the root of power. That is to say it is not the
work of the living men actually employed, or concerned in doing a
given job, that contributes most to its performance.
Three men doing the work of 3,000, or doing work that 10,000 could
not have done, have, let us admit, a particular part in the attainment
of the results, and should receive special honour or recompense for it.
But the ratio between the work done and the worker is not what it
was in the Dark Ages, or even in 1850.
The ‘pit alta giustizia sociale’ demanded by Mussolini in the Milan
Piazza will certainly take count of the proportion between ‘heritage’
and immediate physical labour, or living men’s skill, implicated in the
performance of future production.
In a gross way communism denies utterly the proportion in this
proposition.
Socialism and various left-over schemes refuse to admit a propor-
tion.
It should be apparent that in this great association there is an enor-
mous source of riches, ‘Science has solved the problem of production’,
etc.
Ever since economics emerged from its primitive stage, in hand-
books for bankers, the men who have thought about it have assured
us that money must be an ‘equivalent’; the medium of exchange
must be a true picture of the material represented.
Marx failed to realise sufficiently the root difference between pro-
perty and capital; property a possession; capital a claim on other men’s
work, often savagely enforceable. In like manner volumes have been
wasted in idle discussion because of failure to take adequate count of
the difference between permanent, or long durable, and perishable
and quickly perishable goods.
A fixed money can easily represent permanent goods. Two means,
and I believe two only have been devised for a monetary and credit
system that will simultaneously and steadily represent a conglomer-
ate of durable and perishable goods, one is the Douglasite system of
compensated price, the other the Gesellite Schwundgeld, though not
in the crude state some Gesellites imagine.
Stampscript can only represent the conglomerate (durable and
perishable goods) if issued in a certain ratio to Bred money.
Issued in proper ratio it could do a good deal of what Douglas aims
at, But the ascertaining of that proper ratio would be just as compli-
cated as the computation necessary to decide on Douglas’s ‘just price’.
No system of economics can dispense utterly with all detail and all
computation, Communists and many communisant distributists and
cunctative socialists seem to think that by getting rid of tickets alto-
gether you tend to simplify life,
444

IN THE WOUNDS
Gesellism lies outside a discussion of Orage’s aims. He opposed it.
For the moment I shall simply assert that any Gesellism which refuses
to take count of a ratio, a proportion between the quantity of fixed
money, and that of money requiring a monthly stamp (I per cent) to
keep it valid at par, is not serious,
(Again I assert that three great men studying reality from three
different angles, but without personal vanity, whatever their initial
oppositions, are bound to converge in measure as they attain complete
understanding. My present job is to state Orage’s position, referring to
other concepts only in so far as they help me define his position.)
The fundamental material reality underlying the Douglas solution
of poverty, slums, industrial tyranny, is that the cost of production is
consumption.
Thatis to say a nation during a year is out of pocket, or out of posses-
sion of those things it consumes, destroys, sends abroad.
Whether it produce goods (raw and fabricated), buildings, etc, to
the value of one billion or ten billion, the material cost of those things
is what it exports and consumes, and that destruction includes the
wear and tear on the workmen, it includes the depreciation of the
national health during the period.
I think it was Albert Londres who remarked on the drivelling mania
of the ghouls who govern French Africa; ‘you would think when try-
ing to produce, they would consider the necessity “faire du négre”.’
Those of us who in moments of violent meditation are ready to
treat financial tyrants as Russians once treated Bojars arrive at this
frenzy in considering how the preachers of what they call ‘economy’
meaning the curtailing of consumption, are prodigal of the life and
health of great masses of white populations, Caiaphas and company
do not like to think of these things.
The economy which would build up the health of ten million
Englishmen, and twenty-five million Americans is not yet come into
practice. Only in the Corporate State, and only in Italy has any drive
been made toward this objective.
This saving could come by taking heed of other expenditure and of
the cost of non-human materials.
Apart from the work that goes into it, the cost to England, or Holland
or any other country, during a year, of all it makes, of all that grows
in its fields is the ‘consumption’ (including export).
Toulousains do not eat the veal they ship to Paris, Platitude!
Obvious! But absolutely invisible and incomprehensible to a banker.
You don’t believe me? All right ask a banker. Ask any banker.
When a costing system, that is a system for estimating what any-
thing costs, and therefore what people should pay for it in proportion,
takes count of this fundamental basis, that system will be heading
toward the ‘pit alta giustizia sociale’, it will be heading towards
445

 
economic justice and you will either have Douglas's ‘just price’ or you
will have something with another name that will be found to be rather
like it.
So far no one has had the glittering and transcendent imagination
to think out what the difference will be, but then very few first rate or
even second rate minds have occupied themselves with the problem.
1 have said specifically, and Mussolini knows implicitly, that you
can have an enormous margin of economic injustice in a jolly fine
social system. By which I mean neither you nor I care a hang whether
the steak we have for dinner ‘is worth’ 2s. 3d., 2s. 9d., or 3s. 8d. (three
an’ eight pence) so long as it is a prime steak and so long as we can
afford to get enough. and do get, de facto, enough.
Douglas aims high, and wants economic justice. It may be an en-
gincer’s blueprint of a state unattainable. Radio and flying were once
‘unattainable’.
At any rate Orage writing ‘for God’ insisted on, or at any rate
emphasised justice, though we won't see it in action this summer.
Douglas having invented a mechanism felt, I think, that there was
no use preaching the locomotive, and that it could be of comparatively
little use to people too incurious to investigate its function or too
stupid to understand its utility. There is a good deal to be said for this
attitude,
On the other hand there is a good deal to be said for stopping,
without needless delay, the wholesale murder of great masses oe
population, Orage was so built as to feel indignation at the spectacle
of skilled biologists labouring to find a remedy for pellagra that would
be cheaper than food.
ORAGE
I had no interest in Orage’s mysticism and am unqualified to define it.
I was thankful he had it simply because it kept him in action. He prized
the moral indignation of his contributors, I don’t know that it helped
the clarity of our writing. But, on the other hand, the lack of it in our
contemporaries has not always produced better results, nor on the
whole a clearer outlook,
Mere abuleia, or the sheer cowardice that causes a man to shun a
decision inside his own mind as to the right or wrong, the rightness or
wrongness, the sanity or unsoundness of a given idea or congeries of
ideas does not of itself lead to lucidity of perception or precision of
judgment however much it may help a ninth rate or even a third rate
wordster in the avoidance of immediate trouble.
Orage had the concept: rectitudo, On that rock was his edifice. If the
reader knows a better rock let him take it with my benedictions and
compliments.
446

IN THE WOUNDS
Orage's rectitude demanded justice, justice in the division of the
‘eredità culturale’, the cultural heritage; of the increment of associa-
tion.
It demanded that the price charged the plain man and consumer
should have a just ratio to the real cost of his food and clothing, and
that adequate monetary-tickets should exist.
He did not care particularly who issued the tickets, though Social
Credit, as formulated, favours their control by the ‘representatives of
the people’.
Only within the last few months has a new kind of ‘representation
of the people’ been offered in competition to the very seedy and out at
heels Mother of Parliaments or the assembled employees of the
Standard Oil and other great American companies gathered in
Washington.
This mechanism is a matter of politics. | doubt if Orage had any
political talents whatsoever, He was a moralist, and thence an econo-
mist.
He loathed above all other animal categories the dog in the manger.
Only the descendant of this canine species can hold this against
him.
Those of us who saw the Major's point in the first weeks of his first
declarations find it rather difficult to unsee it, or to put ourselves in
the role of non-perceivers. I don't know how you are to put usin your
places. I mean how, for example, are you going to convince the bee
that a bee-line isn’t the shortest or most convenient to travel.
For three or four years Orage repeated, now soft, now loud, now
irate, now ironic: ‘consumption is the cost of production, You cannot
cure unemployment. Unemployment is not a disease, We could get all
the food and goods needed if the banks would get out of our way, if
the banks wouldn't sabotage our exchange and consumption.’ And so
forth.
Then he took ten years’ vacation. The trams of the Lord move
slowly. The screw propeller for ships was invented as soon as the
paddlewheel.
Three years ago Orage thought the light might have penetrated
Albion's occiput. I suppose our old gang was then in at least three
corners of the spherical planet.
Any government worth a damn could pay dividends instead of levy-
ing taxes. [don’t know who said it first. It was apparent from Douglas's
early propositions.
From early times people have been accustomed to a proportion
between public and private ownership. The ratio has varied, from the
theoretical total ownership of a sovereign to the theoretical total
ownership by ‘them’, i.¢. the theoretical abolition of all private property.
“Mais, ¢a appartient a eux’, said an orthodox Bolshevik official when
447

CONTEMPORARIES
J asked him what really was the difference between the Italian present
regime and his own.
As L have said above, and will have to repeat a thousand four hun-
dred times in the next semester: property and capital differ. They are
not one and the same.
You can upholster any and I believe every economic idea (except
stamp script) with historic background and precedent. You can ring
the changes on town land and crown land, on common and freehold,
You can not obliterate the difference between the righteous and the
unrighteous, or between the man who will learn (in the old sense of
will), the man who has the intention of coming to truth, and the man
who will not learn.
Every honest man in my time who has started thinking about the
nature of money has seen a need to reform the present system of
control of it. What is money? how does it get there? who makes it?
These questions asked week by week. How do men buy; and how can
they?
Who makes the medium of exchange? Who controls them? What
guides them? How did they come into power?
Did Rothschild make money or take money, by his swift ride or his
agent's swift ride after Waterloo?
Who deserves well, and who ill of the state? of the people?
These questions Orage asked over and over in every new form he
could think of.
The gross ignorance of men high in power is demonstrated to me
weck by week, the tergivisations, the twistings of men in authority are
thrown into relief every week on the desk where I am writing. Friend-
ships are broken, and old esteems go by the board when one finds an
old friend deficient, deficient in simple honesty, in an accustomed old
frankness,
‘How can any man trust politicians’, writes the friend of thirty
politicians. “You are a Fascist and to hell with all Fascists’. ‘Heartfelt
thanks’.
‘I have never been able to agree with Douglas's scheme, though I
accept many of his premises; but your views interest me immensely”.
“Value of your name is appreciated-so can't you manage to. do some
other kind of work-anything except economics?’ Arthur Kitson
remarked: the first three professors who started to use my books in
their classrooms were removed from their jobs with great promptness.
‘L assure you that your views are appreciated and that all of the
problems you touched upon are having the thoughtful attention of
the administration’. (20 March 1934) ‘I assure you he (Roosevelt) does
understand that the whole people must be able to buy what the whole
people produces’.
Maybe, but by 19 November F,D.R. hasn't, so far as | know, admitted
448

IN THE WOUNDS
it publicly. Many people seem to think he's been ‘sold up the river’,
From the day Roosevelt entered the White House, Orage was per-
haps his fairest and most open critic. If his hopes and his rages varied
as mine have, his expression was calmer and he seemed less given to
excess in either direction.
As to this — of the public's being able to buy its own produce,
an answer (for the 94th time one would think it was the answer, an
answer, the answer, the ultimate answer to the persistent (but from
every new head of the hydra) question: Why isn’t it (Douglas econo-
mics) just persistent never-ending inflation?
That answer I quoted in print in 1933. ‘Would you call it inflation to
issue tickets for every seat in a theatre, regardless of the fact that the
theatre has until now been always two-thirds empty simply because
no such number of tickets was printed?’
Even in Jefferson's time people were saying you ‘have to have more
money in circulation when you have a greatly increased quantity of
goods’, meaning that for a higher standard of living it will be conven-
ient to have both faster and more ample exchange of products, and to
be adequate the number of tickets, or the accounting, must keep up
with this increase of available consumable or usable goods.
Lack of historic knowledge keeps people from comparing life in an
industrialised country with life in Doughty's desert Arabia or with life
in very dark ages, say about 700 or 800 a.b, when they tell us European
production had dwindled, in fact Europe was producing hardly any-
thing save human beings, and there was an oriental market for
eunuchs.
Historic detail sometimes starts a man thinking. Orage wrote into a
public that had been blindfolded by generations of books produced
under the heel of the profit system, fouled by the mentality of decades
oppressed by university and educational systems warped by the profit
system, by a bureaucracy of education, the bureaucrat being a man
who avoids ‘dangerous’ knowledge, who can almost indefinitely
refrain from taking, officially, cognisance of anything whatsodamn-
ever that is likely to disturb his immediate comfort or expose him to
the least inconvenience or ridicule,
Exempio gratia: Van Buren’s memoirs were written in 1861 and
published in 1920.
There were, and are, arrears of learning for the public to make up,
and against this siltage Orage battled until his last heart gripe. It was
the sea of stupidities, not a clean sea, it was the bog, the mud storm and
quicksand of obfuscation, the ignorance, the non-correlation, the
irritation of the jostled, the gross silence of hired concealers and the
utter triviality of ‘men great in the public eye’, or notorious authors
whose royalties rolled in from the continent, or the U.S.A. or the
provinces,
449

CONTEMPORARIES
‘Has he got an opinion? Is the x . ..z. . . ÿ » . .
the phrase might be) capable of an opinion?’
We knew that kind of comment in the office, Orage sat in Cursitor
Street with a Diogenes lantern of a new pattern; it showed up many
curious profiles. Pickthall came in with facts. The young Turks knew
somebody was lunching with the high, the high, oh very, and so forth.
Whatever one lost in those days in nickle plush and Ritz dinners, one
gained in the zest for knowledge.
‘Very few people’, says Edgar Wallace, ‘are respected by anyone.’
One of the best tributes in the memorial number of the New English
Weekly was from a man who, so far as I know, was scarcely acquainted
with Orage, and whose ee or importance Orage at any rate
professed in private to find wholly beyond his comprehension. I can
telescope both that tribute and Wallace’s epigram from experience.
You could call Orage a damn fool and respect him. I don’t mean you
could do first one and then the other I mean you could do both at
once. Usually you knew that the folly was superficial that it meant an
insistence on something of greater importance than the fancy style or
minor merit of a given case up for discussion, that it amounted to no
more than his singleness of intention, and his urge to get along
toward his goal.
His ‘pickin’ daisies’ covered most of the artistic activities in his
epoch, We who were ten years or more years younger cheered for the
superior daisies. Several seemed rather good.
He printed my ‘Seafarer’ in the old New Age, I think he may have
printed the first draft of the Nekwia (unless it was Granville), he printed
my 38th canto, and the 4Ist went through the press in his last issue.
He didn’t want it ‘dressed up’, For twenty-three years I don’t think
that either of us ever took the other seriously as a critic of letters, and
now thinking of it in retrospect, I wonder how far the difference of
view was a mere matter of the twelve years difference in our ages.
I remember his contented discouragement on one occasion, ‘Oh
well I suppose it just is that] can't make you into a journalist.’
To this day { haven't the faintest idea who read that paper. The onl
man I ever met who had seen my stuff in The New Age was an adcatea.
I was seated in a battleship, one spot where the empire still conserves
order and ceremony; where you still get a Bath oliver; where red wine
is still called claret, at least by the steward. I accused the admiral
(unjustly) of having looked me up in Who's Who.
He on the other hand assured me that ‘these men are personally
honest’ meaning several, as I recall it, cabinet ministers, or at least men
in high place.
The office was equally in the dark as to my interest, at least | remem-
ber one grin of greeting: ‘We were just wondering what you read in the
paper, or how much you look at.’
450
q...p...(orwhatever

IN THE WOUNDS
To weigh Orage at full value the reader is asked carefully to consider
the meaning of the next sentences:
Orage wrote in the British Empire, Even lam old enough to remem-
ber a time when the Empire was very efficient. I think it was efficient
probably because it could make use of a great number of half-wits
(bureaucracy) admirably controlled by a very much smaller number
of johnnies who were manifestly all there.
While the admiral could assure me that his friends were personally
honest, ie. in private dealings, another member of the ruling caste
could equally assure me that his cousin so-and-so who was wry high,
had been very much surprised to find so-and-so lunching with so-and-
so and addressing him by his front name.
All of which tempts me to a number of less relevant speculations,
many possibly pregnant, but all centrifugal, all likely to lead us away
from the main theme: Orage’s ideal, Orage’s concept of justice. You
can’t get twenty-three years of a man’s life into one funeral notice,
The aim concretely was to equate the nation’s purchasing power to
available goods. And by nation we here must include the aggregate of
individuals purchasing goods for their individual needs, as well as
mass purchases made for the needs of the public as public.
(Would you, said Lord Tankerville, say you couldn't build roads
because you hadn't any kilometres?)
To that end Orage meant, as a Douglasite, that any and every man’s
earnings were to be augmented by a share of the ‘increment of associa-
tion’ (with the nation, and with accumulated means of production).
He meant that the price charged should have just relation to the
material cost of the object.
The rest is matter of detailed computation regarding specific cases,
It regards particular cases, The state has credit. Distribution is mainly
effected by means of little pieces of paper, or at least the ultimate
distribution to individuals of their daily and weekly supplies is effected
mainly by little pieces of paper. The French for fifteen years after 1919
used little brass discs labelled ‘Chambres de Commerce de France,
Bon pour 2 francs’, or ‘1 franc’. This fact had no more effect on the
thought of English economists than had Mallarmé on Rudyard
Kipling. Professor Gubbet went there and never knew what he was
using. Dealing with England’s Gubbets Orage finally wore himself out.
If I have inadvertently left any obscurities in this article, I apologise. 1 also refer
the reader who finds the statement lacking in detail, to a brief shilling pamphlet
by Major Douglas The New and Old Econemics (Scots Free Press, 1 India Buildings,
Victoria Street, Edinburgh).
451

D'Artagnan Twenty Years After’
who had a two barrelled art and the gift of verbal invective.
But having had the text bound for preservation and turning
back to inspect it, lam moved to demand a reprint at least of some
passages. The text is still gristly, Mr. Laughlin brilliantly advocates
Gertie Stein as cathartic, the best apology yet. And there may be some-
thing to his plea, A single idea expressed in and as a method is easier
for half-wits to ingurgitate than a seething mass of ideas bursting
through any method and demanding each one its individual capture.
Naturally New Zealand disliked it. Naturally Manchester took six
months to discover the satiric propulsion of the Quarto srast, 1914.
I turn back to Exile, 1927 and find that very little, as indicating
metabolism of writing, has occurred in the interim. I turn back to the
Little Review, 1917/19 and find very little news intervening between that
date and the present on the literary frontier. 1923 winter of the same
periodical showed a fair list of surrealists with all the subsequent
features of that little coterie.
ranis: clap trap heaven of amative German professor
wrote Wyndham Lewis in 1914 or it may have been 1913 if one allows
for delays in printing and the distance between London and Harlesden
(where was Mr, Leveridge’s print shop).
‘We must kill John Bull,’ wrote Mr. Lewis. ‘ntast HUMOUR quack
english drug for stupidity and sleepiness, arch enemy of the real,
conventionalising like gunshot.’ ‘Impossibility for Englishman to be
grave and keep his end up.’ ‘Chaos of Enoch Ardens.’
It wasn't the finished thing. It wasn’t the finished article. Cocteau
in the Mystére Laic years later gave us the silk-fine web of indirect
criticism. Nothing is new and all good is renewal.
Aristotle spoke the true word about metaphor, the apt use whereof
is the true hall-mark of genius.
The hokku is the Jap’s test. If le style c'est ’homme, the writer's blood
test is his swift contraposition of objects.
Most hokkus are bilateral,
The foot-steps of the cat upon
The snow:
Plum blossoms,
Pe there were only two musketeers, that is, three of us in all
1 The Criterion, July 1937,
452

D'ARTAGNAN TWENTY YEARS AFTER
May seem to the careless peruser to be only bilateral, two visual
images; but they are so placed as to contain wide space and a stretch
of colour between them. The third element is there, its dimension
from the fruit to the shadow in the foot-prints. No moral but a mood
caught in its pincers.
The waves rise
And the waves fall but you
(this is a hero's monument in Nippon)
are like the moonlight: always there."
Another dimension. From dead thesis, metaphor is distinct. Any thesis
is dead in itself. Life comes in metaphor and metaphor starts TowARD
ideogram.
The live writer in France is Cocteau. The live writer in England has
been for over a quarter of a century Wyndham Lewis vorticist,
The ideogrammic method did not wait for Fenollosa‘s treatise to
become current in book form. We didn’t wait to know of Fenollosa’s
existence. Nevertheless 1912-14 London fought its way into the sodden
light of that epoch,
1908 saw a stirring. By 1912 it was established, at least in Ormond St.,
that the cardboard Shaw and the suety Wells were Not the voice. That
i a Bennett was inadequate, that British impressionism was too
soft.
England was so smug in those days (as in 1937) that Blast was re-
garded as violent. So dynamic is ANY equation that attains any sort of
justness whatsoever.
BLAST is a legend. I could fill pages with citations from it and go
undetected.
‘Chaucer was very much cousin of Villon as an artist. Shakespeare
and Montaigne formed one literature.’ ‘Humour is a phenomenon
caused by sudden pouring of culture into Barbary.”
That is Mr. Lewis in Blast. So also is: ‘Chaos invading concept.’ ‘Any
great Northern Art will partake of this insidious and volcanic chaos.
No great English art need be ashamed to share some glory with France,
tomorrow it may be with Germany where the Elizabethans did before
it. But it will never be French any more than Shakespeare was, the
most catholic and subtle Englishman.’
The whole public and even those of us who then knew him best,
have been so befuddled with the concept of Lewis as exrtosive that
scarcely anyone has had the sense or the patience to look calmly at his
1 Quoted in Canto XCIII. Ed,
453

LCUNTEMPURARICS
perfectly equanimous suave and equipoised observations of letters.
The difference between a gun and a tree is a difference of tempo. The
tree explodes every spring.
Any full man, any man who approaches the Renaissance totali-
tarianism, who refuses to run in the most paying groove repeating
himself once a week or once monthly to meet a ‘demand’ is bound to
suffer occultation, to remain three-fourths in shadow because men
of little comprehension can not reconcile themselves to, or
digest the concept of, intelligence shining in divers places from a
centre,
The public (his public) so expects Mr. Lewis to break out philoso-
phically, or in relation to politics and social institutions that no one
asks whether his donation to the critique of letters is or isn’t in sub-
stance equal to Mr. Eliot's.
‘The Latins are at present in their discovery of sport ... gush over
machines ... the most romantic and sentimental “moderns” to be
found. It is only the second-rate people in France or Italy who are
thorough revolutionaries.’
‘The nearest thing in England to the great traditional French artist,
is a great revolutionary English one.’
I repeat: the silky quality of Le Mystére Laic is not here. But this
was written in 1914. No two writers having any real value completely
overlap one another,
When Lewis writes for the eye, he is visible. General formulations in
the writing of Lewis or of any man do not and can never attain the
vividness of The Enemy of the Stars. Why should I open to that play at a
time when Mr. Eliot has just been exhorting England over the air to be
poetic in dramedy I don't know. La forza del destine, Here was poetic
drama.
Here before the B.B.C. murmured at every fire-side was and 1s
(mehercule) the ranto prama. Written, printed 1914, impossible of
presentation by any medium save the human voice carried through
the black air: a DRAMA.
A drama for Radio because no material theatre and no conceivably
effective precentor with a megaphone standing in the pit bellowing
the stage directions could move the theatre goer as could the proper
changes of voice by a great speaker ‘on the air’.
The play has waited a technique for its presentation. Cocteau has
evolved the technique. First with his own voice and megaphone off
stage in Les Mariés and in Antigone, then with the Columbia discs; much
to the distress of the studio director. Cocteau in his fumoir with his
discs and his radio, with his oracle that speaks pure cipher, unsurpass~
able trouvaille; cleaving-stroke of the spirit, moving as no human
voice,
454

D'ARTAGNAN TWENTY YEARS AFTER
Cing, douze
Cocteau has evolved the technique for Argol. In detail. But The Enemy
of the Stars had been written before that.
‘Immense collapse of chronic philosophy. He bulges all over.
Human bull rushes into the circus. He is nof even a “star”.'
This is pre-war, It is very distinctly pre-Gertic. ‘Red of stained copper
predominant colour. Overturned cases and other impedimenta have
been covered, throughout arena, with old sail canvas.’
One, or at least the present, writer is mildly bored with the tosh
emitted during more than a decade by Mr. Joyce’s epigons; blather
about the revolution of the word. The renovation of the word may
stem out of Stendhal. Flaubert was certainly grandfather to any verbal
renovation of our time, but the phase specifically touted by Mr.
Joyce’s Parisians and international penumbra was already in full
vigour in Mr. Lewis’ writings in Btast 1914, At a time when Mr. Joyce
was still the strict classicist of ‘Chamber Music’, ‘Dubliners’ and the
Portrait of the Artist as a beaw jeune homme. The difference being that
Lewis’ renovation of the word was a vigorous renovation and not a
diarrhoetic imitation of Mr. Joyce’s leisurely flow and murmurous
permuting. Lewis’ renovation was conceptual, Joyce’s merely, in the
main, sonorous, an attraction of the half-awake consciousness to and
by similar sounds.
Naturally the abundance of conceptual bustle in Lewis is infinitely
less digestible, thence less attractive to writers of mediocre envergure.
It is radically inimitable in that it can only come from a think-
organism in action, a mind actually initiating concepts, or at least
very busily chucking them from one side of a head to another,
‘Sudden indignation at Argol acting, he who had no right to act.’
BLAST was regarded as a manifesto, as an action, which it was, but an
excessive preoccupation with that particular part of its function has
obscured the more durable elements, the level criticism, for example,
of the note: Futurism, Magic and Life.
The public was manifestly not ready for the kind of criticism that
Lewis then offered ‘them’. Mr. Laughlin in his New Directions speaks
eloquently of the subjects under his eye, but some of them should
stand in a wider artographic survey, that is, in relation to what Lewis
had printed before Mr. Laughlin started assessing our universe. As, for
example, the note on Relativism and Picasso, the attack on the dead-
ness inherent in matures mortes by definition (an essay on the then ‘latest’
Picasso work, namely what he had done 1912-14).
The next note begins:
‘A civilised savage in a desert city, surrounded by very simple
objects. …
‘Sculpture of the single sententious or sentimental figure. . ..”
455

CONTEMPORARIES
The durable malady or limitation of the criticism in Blast is not that
it is broken and jabby, but that there still hangs about it a ‘morning-
after’. Lewis had escaped from the polite paragraph but the old inertia
of momentum still led him to finish his sentences, often when the
complete revelation of idea had been made in a single phrase.
The ‘world’ in those days was so accustomed to having its sun
(intellectual sun) rise in Paris that no one even today remembers that
Lewis’ remark on Ingres and the recent cult of ugliness preceded
Cocteau's clean cut identification of D'Annunzio and Marinetti. So
unmoying was the air in the French parlour and dining room that
Aragon’s generation doesn’t yet know that at given date the French
were missing a train already gone from the Ormond St. and Kensing-
ton junction.
‘When an ugly or uncomely person appeared on the horizon of their
daily promenade Ingres’ careful wife would raise her shaw! protect-
ingly, and he would be spared a sight that would have offended him.
‘Today the Artist’s attention would be drawn, on the contrary, to
anything particularly hideous or banal, as a thing not to be missed.
Stupidity is .. . etc.’
‘A man could make just as fine an art in discords, and with nothing
but ‘ugly’ trivial and terrible materials, as any classic artist did with
only ‘beautiful’ and pleasant means.
“But it would have to be a very tragic and pure creative instinct.”
Readers of Lewis are so often startled, or read him so often with the
expectation of being startled that they don’t wait for the end of his
thought.
‘The Kaiser had made war on cubism before he made it on England.’
‘All the fun in Shaw’s plays . . .is based on sport and blood.’ The second
issue (1915) contains these bits of information and ‘A super-Krupp or
War's End’.
“And it seems to me that as far as art is concerned, things will be
exactly the same after the war as before it.’ That sentence illustrates
Mr. Lewis’ balance and sanity, 1915, A totally different mental equip-
ment from that rampant in the Wells-Shaw-Bennett-Sidney-Webb
bowillabaisse of half-masted blather which preceded my decade and
Lewis’ decade.
Just as Gaudier got a great deal of what he intended to say into The
Embracers, so without anyone’s much suspecting it Lewis got a great
deal more of a world-map of his own intentions into those two
volumes of Blast, than anyone has taken the trouble to notice.
These were the intentions of an already consummate combiner of
forms, of a man who has mastered the relation of volumes in an art
which has actually only two dimensions as its field of expression, As to
his colour sense. Compare Lewis 1912 with Max Ernst or Matisse, to
take two maxima of the century.
456

D'ARTAGNAN TWENTY YEARS AFTER
As achieved work in writing you have Tarr, you have the early short
stories, and you have the Apes of God or atany rate you will have it when
its contemporaneity has worn off and a few readers can regard it as an
objective manifestation, that is as a work in which figures are ‘created’,
exposed, set forth.
This is the Britain of Fielding, Smollett, Hogarth and Rowlandson,
I mean as they were in their strong interiors.
To this catalogue of Lewis’ writings, I still wish we might add the
unwritten rest of the Crowd Master, which it is now too late for Lewis
or for anyone else to conclude.
Of my own contributions to Blast the note on Binyon’s Flight of the
Dragon ought to have preceded that on his translation of Dante in my
last volume of essays, where it would have been had I not overlooked it.
If this present note can be regarded as spoken to toddlers gathered
at one’s knee, I should reiterate the sentence on a great deal of Paris
being chronologically later than the London of 1914, the best of Paris
followed fairly quickly (meaning Picabia then in New York and Dada
then suckling in Geneva). The afternoons at Picabía's with Cocteau
and Marcel Duchamp were thoroughly d la page in 1920-21, but the
rest of Paris was not, and so far as I can make out from incipient
London 1936-37 there is ten years of time lag still in your city. News is,
I suppose, news after a decade if the news reader is overpoweringly
earth-bound, spatial, etc., but the velocity is rather that of a fog than
of etheric vibration.
The natural antithesis now as it was two decades ago is between
Joyce and Lewis. The critic can get a number of useful measurements
by it. In Lewis’ favour today one is almost driven to the summary that
‘at any rate’ Lewis has never for five minutes been willing just to sit
back and be a celebrity. Herein Mr. Joyce celticly approaches his
equally celebrated Irish confrere and predecessor.
LA RICHEZZA E LO SCAMBIO
One theme in the foregoing paragraphs needs exegesis. 1am nowhere
pleading for mere novelty or mere news value in art. ‘We' London
1911-14 were subsequent to a great deal of Paris. For example Fernand
Leger in 1902 was doing the kind of drawing which Gaudier did in 1911,
I can not believe that any great number of people in England, the
U.S.A, or even in Paris know this. I know it only by accident, having
lived a few doors from Leger and having by sheer chance turned over
a soiled bit of paper amid a heap of his sketches, saying at once: ‘My
God, Fernand I didn’t know you could do that!’
To which the rich slow voice; Oh voui, mais je pouvais pas PEINDRE,
That is the measure of Leger’s asceticism; of the sobriety of his pur-
pose. The Leger known to the great public, carpet designs, mechanical
457

CONTEMPORARIES
forms, put aside his facility. Nobody knows him as draughtsman (you
could compare Plate XXVII in my ‘Gaudier-Brzeska’); all that quick
appeal was put aside for the autre chose, the thing people didn't know,
and that Leger has built up in thirty-five years, impressive perhaps, or
at least justly assessable, only when you see Leger’s work en bloc.
Opulence comes of exchange. There were any number of continen-
tal precursings. It was definitely our job, London 1908 to ‘14 in the
workings of one intellectual blood circuit to eliminate our ignorance
of ten years’ continental plastic and forty years’ continental writing.
But Paris post-war had a torpid liver, its digestion was weak and
even Voisin’s has vanished. We knew we were subsequent, Aragon’s
generation did not.
The wave that had Picasso as foam rose at least into 1922. And the
intellect inside it was Picabia whose mental activities cannot be ignored
in any serious chronicle of the decade 1914-24.
You can trace a very vital critical action [sic]: Wyndham Lewis,
Picabia, Cocteau. Disjunct, not the conscious process of a conspiracy
but lively minds meeting a common need of the period.
‘He discovers the moon once 2 week’ remarked Francis Picabia of
Mons. Z.
Picabia is the only man I have ever met who has a genius for hand-
ling abstract concepts with the ease and surety a chartered accountant
would have with a bill (ordinary) of lading. Bert Russell strikes me as
a half wit. The philosophers de carriére, the men who write AROUT what
they call thought, etc. and philosophy, are all heavy, incompetent
dunderheads, insensitive to one or other part of the spectrum.
If you don’t examine ‘J. C. Rastaquouére” between ‘nrast’ and Le
Mystère Laic you lose the chronological sequence in those états du
cerveau états de l‘îme wherethrough and whereby ‘literature renews
itself’.
The definition of rasta being: étranger dont les moyens d'existence sont
inconmus.*
‘Pai envie de fabriquer une voiture automobile “artistique” en bois
de rose, mélange de pillules Pink. Les pneumatiques seraient en
acier et les billes en caoutchouc, comme FUTURISME ce ne serait pas
mal.”
Francis, enfant terrible as draughtsman, ten lines to summarise a
year’s work by Picasso. Francis the only man who was really indignant
at the Mariés de la Tour Eifel because it was not a new creation from
scratch. Cet homme, if abime tout, C'est La Tour Eifel de Delauny.
To my mind this was very unjust, in that it did not credit the energy
!‘La litterature se renouvelle par fois par les grands sentiments qu‘on a
les états du cerveau—états d‘âme—plus à sa portée.’ Gabrielle Buffet, Intro-
que par la forme ou le sujet, quelque- duction to Picabla's J.C.R.
? Quoted Canto CV, Ed.
438

D’ARTAGNAN TWENTY YEARS AFTER
and real work required to get a given effect from a painter's canvas
onto the stage and into action. But it was nevertheless prophetic of
what the delightful entertainment became the instant Cocteau took
his hands off it and the performers were free to break down all Jean’s
precisions of movement. I mean the stylisation of their gestures,
whereof they were limited to one each in the original presentation.
Picabia greeted Marinetti post-war with: ‘I dreamt that it was my
great-grandfather who discovered America, but not being an Italian
he said nothing about it to anyone.’
When we were selecting stuff to be reproduced in a special Picabia
number of the t/x. I picked a dozen canvases, then another dozen and
said: ‘but at any rate not that one’.
‘No!’ he replied, ‘Not that one, C’est de Picasso.’ As it was, a gift.
Picabia was the dynamic under Dada.
It is you might say ‘footless’ to present surrealism without its mental
état civile~merely because 66 pages of Picabia were locked in a cellar
by a terrified publisher, and are, thence, little known outside the
very active group which had immediate access to them in 1919 and
20
‘Europe exhausted by the conquest of Alsace Lorraine.’ Pauvres dtres
tombés par centaine pour la gloire d‘un ventriloque.
Il y a beaucoup moins
de choses sur terre
que ne nous le fait croire
notre philosophie
Even if Picabia’s sole virtue were corrosive, which I don’t for a
moment grant, Europe in 1919-22 needed ammonia, it needed an eau de
Javel triple strong, and a man who could cut the barnacles off Picasso,
Cocteau, Marinetti, pitilessly but with consummate good humour
was an asset to Europe.
I have written more than once that Gaudier-Brzeska was the most
complete case of Genius I have ever encountered, Put it creative
genius, fully equipped, but Gaudier wasn't a danger to everyone in the
room. You could have slept or dreamt for twenty minutes while
Gaudier was hammering the butt end of a chisel, but you had not the
excitement of mental peril which accompanied Francis Picabia. There
was never a rubber button on the end of his foil. It wasn’t a foil, it was
a razor sharp at the point and had thereby the vastly greater pedagogi-
cal value.
The intention of this article, in case it may still have escaped any
reader, is to assert by implication that the intellectual world of our
time, or my time, has contained a reasonable number of large and
vivid mental animals, enough to prevent a moderate man’s feeling he
lives in an absolute desert, and secondly to assert quite openly the
459

CONTEMPORARIES
trouble there was, the midwifery required, to get out of the nineteen
hundred and eights (London) or the fin dw siécle dixneuviéme Paris and
leave a place free for Prufrock. I mean for a new decade to get started
without cerements, without verbal ligatures still binding it to the
world of my adolescence, of Lewis‘s adolescence.!
if you take it 1 am being ‘helpful’ BLAST 1914; mast 1915; Picabia‘s
or providing documents pour servir, say J. C. Rastaquonére; Cocteau's Mysére
that I suggest the following works as Laic, American translation of which is
subject of essay (with their dates) to included in J, L.'s anthology.
the, I hope, much younger critic who
will analyse Mr. James Laughlin's
New Directions,

Ford Madox (Hueffer) Ford; Obit’
here passed from us this June a very gallant combatant for
those things of the mind and of letters which have been in our
time too little prized. There passed a man who took in his time
more punishment of one sort and another than I have seen meted to
anyone else. For the ten years before I got to England there would
seem to have been no one but Ford who held that French clarity and
simplicity in the writing of English verse and prose were of immense
importance as in contrast to the use of a stilted traditional dialect, a
‘language of verse’ unused in the actual talk of the people, even of ‘the
best people’, for the expression of reality and emotion,
In 1908 London was full of ‘gargoyles’, of poets, that is, with high
reputation, most of whose work has gone since into the discard. At
that time, and in the few years preceding, there appeared without
notice various fasciculae which one can still, surprisingly, read, and
they were not designed for mouthing, for the ‘rolling out‘ of ‘ohs‘.
They weren't what people were looking for as the prolongation of
Victoria's glory. They weren't, that is, ‘intense’ in the then sense of the
word,
The justification or programme of such writing was finally (about
1913) set down in one of the best essays (preface) that Ford ever wrote.
It advocated the prose value of verse-writing, and it, along with his
verse, had more in it for my generation than all the groping (most
worthily) after ‘quantity’ (.e., quantitative metric) of the late Laureate
Robert Bridges or the useful, but monotonous, in their day unduly
neglected, as more recently unduly touted, metrical labours of G.
Manley Hopkins.
T have put it down as personal debt to my forerunners that I have
had five, and only five, useful criticisms of my writing in my lifetime,
one from Yeats, one from Bridges, one from Thomas Hardy, a recent
one from a Roman Archbishop and one from Ford, and that last the
most vital, or at any rate on par with Hardy’s.
That Ford was almost an halluciné few of his intimates can doubt.
He felt until it paralysed his efficient action, he saw quite distinctly the
Venus immortal crossing the tram tracks, He inveighed against Yeats’
lack of emotion as, for him, proved by Yeats’ so great competence in
making literary use of emotion.
And he felt the errors of contemporary style to the point of rolling
1 The Nineteenth Century and After, August 1939; New Directions, 1942.
461

CONTEMPORARIES
(physically, and if you look at it as mere superficial snob, ridiculously)
on the floor of his temporary quarters in Giessen when my third
volume displayed me trapped, fly-papered, gummed and strapped
down in a jejune provincial effort to learn, mehercule, the stilted lan-
guage that then passed for ‘good English’ in the arthritic milieu that
held control of the respected British critical circles, Newbolt, the back-
wash of Lionel Johnson, Fred Manning, the Quarterlies and the rest
of ‘em.
And that roll saved me at least two years, perhaps more. It sent me
back to my own proper effort, namely, toward sing the living tongue
(with younger men after me), though none of us has found a more
natural language than Ford did.
This is a dimension of poetry. It is, magari, an Homeric dimension,
for of Homer there are at least two dimensions apart from the surge
and thunder. Apart from narrative sense and the main construction,
there is this to be said of Homer, that never can you read half a page
without finding melodic invention, still fresh, and that you can hear
the actual voices, as of the old men speaking in the course of the
phrases.
It is for this latter quality that Ford's poetry is of high importance,
both in itself and for its effect on all the best subsequent work of his
time. Let no young snob forget this.
1 propose to bury him in the order of merits as I think he himself
understood them, first for an actual example in the writing of poetry;
secondly, for those same merits more fully shown in his prose, and
thirdly, for the critical acumen which was implicit in his finding these
merits,
As to his prose, you can apply to it a good deal that he wrote in
praise of Hudson (rightly) and of Conrad, I think with a bias toward
generosity that in parts defeats its critical applicability. It lay so natural
on the page that one didn’t notice it. I read an historical novel at sea
in 1906 without noting the name of the author, A scene at Henry
Villth’s court stayed depicted in my memory and I found years later
that Ford had written it.
I wanted for private purposes to make a note on a point raised in
Ancient Lights; I thought it would go on the back of an envelope, and
found to my young surprise that I couldn't make the note in fewer
words than those on Ford’s actual page, That set me thinking, meher-
cule. [did not in those days care about prose, If ‘prose’ meant anything
to me, it meant Tacitus (as seen by Mackail), a damned dangerous
model for a young man in those days or these days in England, though
I don’t regret it; one never knows enough about anything. Start with
Tacitus and be cured by Flaubert vid Ford, or start with Ford or
Maupassant and be girt up by Tacitus, after fifty it is kif kif, all one,
But a man is a pig not to be grateful to both sides.
462

FORD MADOX (HUEFFER) FORD; OBIT
Until the arrival of such ‘uncomfortables’ as Wyndham Lewis, the
distressful D. H. Lawrence, D. Goldring, G. Cannan, etc., I think Ford
had no one to play with. The elder generation loathed him, or at any
rate such cross-section of it as | encountered. He disturbed "em, he
took Dagon by the beard, publicly. And he founded the greatest
Little Review or pre-Little Review of our time. From 1908 to 1910 he
gathered into one fasciculus the work of Hardy, H. James, Hudson,
Conrad, C. Graham, Anatole France, the great old-stagers, the most
competent of that wholly unpleasant decade, Bennett, Wells, and, I
think, even Galsworthy.
And he got all the first-rate and high second-raters of my own
decade, W. Lewis, D. H. Lawrence (made by Ford, dug out of a board
— in Croydon), Cannan, Walpole, etc. (Eliot was not yet on the
scene).
The inner story of that review and the treatment of Ford by its
obtainers is a blot on London’s history that time will not remove,
though, of course, it will become invisible in the perspective of years.
As critic he was perhaps wrecked by his wholly unpolitic generosity.
In fact, if he merits an epithet above all others, it would be “The
Unpolitic’. Despite all his own interests, despite all the hard-boiled
and half-baked vanities of all the various lots of us, he kept on dis-
covering merit with monotonous regularity.
His own best prose was probably lost, as isolated chapters in un-
achieved and too-quickly-issued novels. He persisted in discovering
capacities in similar crannies. In one weekly after another he found
and indicated the capacities of Mary, Jenny, Willard, Jemimah,
Horatio, etc., despite the fact that they all of em loathed each other,
and could by no stretch of imagination be erected into a compact
troop of Fordites supporting each other and moving on the citadels of
publication.
And that career I saw him drag through three countries. He took up
the fight for free letters in Paris, he took it up again in New York,
where I saw him a fortnight before his death, still talking of meritor-
ious novels, still pitching the tale of unknown men who had written
the histoire morale contemporaine truthfully and without trumpets, told
this or that phase of America as seen from the farm or the boiler-
works, as he had before wanted young England to see young England
from London, from Sussex.
And of all the durable pages he wrote (for despite the fluff, despite
the apparently aimless meander of many of ’em, he did write durable
pages) there is nothing that more registers the fact of our day than the
two portraits in the, alas, never-finished Women and Men (Three Moun-
tains Press, 1923), Meary Walker and ‘T”,
463

For T.S.E.”
is was the true Dantescan voice—not honoured enough, and
deserving more than I ever gave him.
1 had hoped to see him in Venice this year for the Dante
commemoration at the Giorgio Cini Foundation-instead: Westmin-
ster Abbey. But, later, on his own hearth, a flame tended, a presence
felt.
Recollections? let some thesis writer have the satisfaction of ‘dis-
covering’ whether it was in 1920 or ‘21 that I went from Excideuil to
meet a rucksacked Eliot. Days of walking-conversation? literary?
le papier Fayard was then the burning topic, Who is there now for me to
share a joke with?
Am I to write ‘about’ the poet Thomas Stearns Eliot? or my friend
‘the Possum’? Let him rest in peace. I can only repeat, but with the
urgency of 50 years ago: READ HIM.
\ The Sewanee Review, Winter 1966.

INDEX
Abelard, Peter, 134, 207 Metaphysics, 183
Adams, Brooks, 307-9, 323, 340, 341 Nichomachean Ethics, 86, 183, 350
The Law of Civilization and De— Poetics, 183
cay, quoted 307, 307n, quoted Politics, 172, 181, 182, 350
308, 309 Amold, Matthew, 386, 387
Adams, Charles Francis, 307 Artemis, 53, 120
Adams, Henry, 147, 149, 158, 164, Aryan Path, The, 64n, 75n
182, 183 Atalanta, 40
Adams, John, 147-58, quoted 159, Athenaeum, The, 207n
161, 162, 165, 168, 169, 170, 173, Athene, 120, 407—8
174, 182, 284, 297, quoted 310, Atlantic, The, 142, 113
quoted 313, 314, 323, quoted 326, Atlantic Monthly, The, 404
344 Atys, 58
Adams, John Quincy, 148, 149, 173, Augustulus, Romulus, 150
177, 297, 307 Augustus, The Emperor, 150
Aeschylus, 23, 436 Avicenna, 68
Agenda, 303n, 352n Avigliano, 347
Albigensian Crusade, 59, 61
Albigeois, The, 58, 59, 430
Aldington, Richard, 395
Alexander the Great, 55 Bach, |. 5., 58, 268
Ambrose, Saint, 90, 150, 293, quoted Bacon, Francis, 210, quoted $16, 323
347 — Baisi, Aurelio, 336n
Amen Hotep, 51 Balzac, Honore de, 153
pee Academy, The, 107, 113, Bankhead, Senator John Hollis, 280,
American Civil War, The, 171, 173, pie eis The, 176, 246, 301
175, 301, 309, 338 308, 809, 387—8, 343 ” ”— ‘
American Revolution, The, 168, 180, Bank of the US,, The, 176, 178, 179,
309, 313, 338 297, $09
AA 420 Baruch, Bernard, 267
Angelico, Fra, 24
Antheil, George, 220
Antonelli, Giacomo, 77-8
Antonino da Firenze, Saint, 90, 293
Antoninus Pius, 272, 311
Bateman, H. M., 128
Baxter, Richard, 65
Bayle, Pierre, 150, 151, 154, 204, 304
Dictionnaire Historique et Cri-
Aphrodite, 48, 120 tique, 154
\:ul"l;d ;; Bay State Hymn Book, The, 164
Aquinas, Thomas, 58, 149, 154, 199, Beardsley, Aubrey, 24, 360
282, 320, 410 Beddoes, Thomas Lovell, 158, 878-
Aragon, Louis, 287, 433, 456, 458 83
Ariosto, Ludovico, 54 Death's Jest Book, 378, quoted 379,
Aristotle, 56, 86, 167, 172, 181, 182, quoted, 380-3
183, 289, 272, 291, $23, 328, $36, Beethoven, Ludwig van, 31
350, 452 Belcher, George, 128, 427
Economics, 182 Bellinoi, Aimeric de, 43
465

INDEX
  
Belmont, August, 182 Cairoli, Sac, Luig, Pasquale, I! Gius-
Bennett, Arnold, 281, 433, 453, 463 to prezzo nel Medio Aevo, 323
Berkeley, Bishop George, 153, 157, Caja, Corrado, 333
323 Calhoun, John, 183
Bernhardt, Sarah, 287 Calvin, John, 70, 265, 273, 300n, 323
Bible, The, 64, 65, 68, 91, 150, 174, Campbell, Joseph, 104
176, 265, 266, 278 Camoens, Luis de, 24, 25
The New Testament, 65 Campion, Thomas, 198
Biddle, Nicholas, 253 Canello, U. A., 42
Biel, Gabriele, 273 Cannan, Gilbert, 463
Binyon, Laurence, Flight of the Carleton, Mark, 278, 281
Dragon, 456 Carnegie, Andrew, 132, 222
Bion, Death of Adonis, 323, 328 Carnegie Endowment for Interna-
Bird, William, 440 tional Peace, The, 222-5, 267
Bismarck, Otto von, 43 Carnegie Foundation, 152
Blake, William, quoted 119, 378, 418 Carus, Paul, 281
Book of the Dead, 119 Catholic Church, The, 57, 58, 61, 62,
Blum, Leon, 440 63, 64, 65, 67, 68, 76, 77, 84, 86, 90,
Book of Rites, The (Li Ki), 87 151, 155, 156, 176, 190, 194, 273,
Borgia, Caesar, 167 317, 320, 329, 343, 443
Born, Bertrans de, 26, quoted 43, 322 Cato, the Censor, 157, 347
Bomeilh, Giraut de, 26 De Rustica quoted 347
Bossuet, Jacques Benigne, 57, 67, 78, Catullus, 28, 29, 32, quoted 41, 286,
156 319, $24, 328, 390, 392
Bowers, Claude Gernade, Jefferson Cavalcanti, Guido, 24, 26, $1, quoted
and Hamilton, 182 41, 56, 59, 95, 286, quoted 320, 324,
Brancusi, Constantin, 283, 427 334, 335, 300, 394
Brantóme, Pierre de Bourdeilles, 154 Cavour, Count Camillo, 312, 327, 329
Bridges, Robert, 390, 461 Century Magazine, The, 112, 412
Bridson, D. G., 398 Ceres, 119
British Museum, 187 Cézanne, Paul, 427
British Union Quarterly, The, 283n Chapman, George, 386
Browning, Robert, 32, 129, 158, 878, Charlemagne, 126, 150, 156, 292
386, 367, 388 Charles the Great (see Charlemagne)
Grammarian, quoted 129 Chase, Salmon Portland, 184
The Ring and the Book, 387 Chateaubriand, Francois René, 156,
Bruni, Abert, 273 392
Bryan, William Jennings, 179, 219 ee Geoffrey, 30, 158, 200, 204,
59
Bucer, Martin, 265
Buchan, John,
Oliver Gromuwell, 265—6
Buddhism, 67, 97, 194
Chaudel, Paul, 413, 416
Chenneviére, Georges, 370, 416
Cherbury, Lord Herbert of, $05.
Chesterton, G. K., 135, 155
Bullet, Gabrielle, quoted 458n “hi ;
Bunting, Basil, 325, 397, 399, 400, San Ἐν αν 223
quoted 400 ‘in. Shi chi:
Burckhardt, Jacob, quoted 22, oa Pl ee EE TaDa
quoted 201 Chlodovic, 108
Burns, Robert, 151, 158 Chopin, Frederick, 31
Busoni, Ferruccio Benvenuto, 31 Christ, 57, 199, 194, 404, 407, 409, 412
Butchart, Montgomery, Money, 160, Christianity, 52, 53, 56, 57, 58, 61, 62,
311 2 63, 64-9, 70, 77, 78, 84, 86, 90, 95,
Butler, Dr. Nicholas Murray, 222 130, 151, 193-4, 216, 221, 231, 320,
Byron, 95, 378 430
466

INDEX
 
 
  
Churchill, Winston S,, 232, 338, 344 Cummings, Ἐν E, 164, 317, 318,
Church of England, The, 77, 276, quoted 324-5, 400
280, 281, 408—9 Eimi, 400
Cid, Peoma del, 30 Cunningham Graham, R. B., 432,
Clay, Henry, 121 463
Coates, Messrs, 209, 210 Curtio, Francisco, 273
Cocteau, Jean, 400, 433-6, 452, 455,
454-455, 457, 458, 459, 460n
Antigone, quoted 435, 454
La Machine Infernale, quoted 436 D., Presidente, quoted 62
Les Maries, 454 Daladier, Edouard, 301
Mystére Laic, 434n, 452, 454, 455 Danicl, Arnaut, 24, 26, 27, 31, 38,
Ocdipe, 434 quoted 40-1, 41, 42, quoted 43, 59,
Coleridge, S. T., 110, 378, 413, 414, 922
quoted 429 D'Annunzio, Gabriele, quoted 25,
Columbus, Christopher, 148, 205, 272 quoted 417, 433, 456
Colvin, Sidney, 200 Dante, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31, 36, quoted
Commonwealth College Fortnightly, 38, 38, 42, 43, 50, 61,65, quoted 76,
The, quoted 201 quoted 78, 80, quoted 84, quoted
Confucius, 53, 55, 65-9, 75-80, 81, 97, 88, 90, 91, 93, 94, 131, 146,
158, 167, 193, 194, 216, 221, 243, quoted 150, 153, 165, 167, 176,
300n, 318, 321, $22, 324, 382-3, 201, quoted 265, 272, 286, 341,
350, 410 319, 320, 322, 323, 324, quoted
Ta Hsio (The Great Digest), 75— 329, 333, 334, 335, 342, quoted
80, 82, 167, 221, 306, 322, 322n, 360, 361, 390, 391, 421, 457, 464
350 Del Vulgari Eloquentia, 27, 75,
Analects, 82, 84, 86, 92, 221, quoted 322, 323, quoted 524, 554, quoted
333, 350 335
Chung Yung (The Unwobbling La Divina Commedia, quoted 27,
Pivot), 82, 350 30, 31, 42, quoted 38, 56, 90,
The Spring and Autumn {the quoted 150, quoted 265, 269,
Ch'un Ch'iu), 87 quoted 311, 322, quoted 329,
The Odes, 306, 318 332, quoted 342, quoted 349
Conrad, Joseph, quoted 31, 462, 463 La Vita Nuova, quoted 29, 38
Constable, John, 301 Darius, 193
Constantine the Great, 90, 150, 156 Davanzati, Bernado, Tacitus, 850
Constitution, The U.S., quoted 159, Davidsohn, Robert, 58
quoted 314, quoted 326 Debussy, Claude Achille, 38
Coolidge, President Calvin, 147 Del Mar, Alexander, 352
Corbiére, Tristan, $18, 871-3 Demeter, 48
Corneille, Pierre, 416 Demosthenes, 350
Cornell University, 133 Orations, 182, 311
Crawford, William Harris, 159, 183, De Quincey, Thomas, 313
296, 326 Deslys, Gaby, 103
Creusot, Messrs., (Schneider iron and Dewey, D. R., Financial History of
steel mills and munitions plants), the United States, 183, 184
222 Dial, The, 287
Crevel, René, 287, 318, 325 Diana, 48
Les Pieds dans le Plat, $25 Dies Trae, 404
Criterion, The, 81n, 84, 227n, 272n, Diocletian, 106
284n, 440n, 452n Diogenes, 35
Cromwell, Oliver, 65, 265, 266 Dis, 327
Cromwell, Thomas, 266 Donohue, William, 105
Cros, Guy Charles, 325 Dostoievsky, Fyodor, 54
467

INDEX
 
Doughty, Charles, 253, 449 Fabians, the, 207, 210
Arabia Deserta, 253, 449 Fack, H. A., 183, 272n, 278, 280
Douglas, C. H., 160, 177, 184, 107—12, Fall—Sinclair case, The, 218
232, 236, 239, 241, 242, 248, 251, Fascism, 214, 232, 204, 300, 306, 312,
252, 254, 262, 268, 273, 275, 276, 318, 318
277, 278, 280, 282, 293, 294, 299, Federal Reserve Board, The, 246
$12, 339, $46, 437, 439, 441-42, Fenollosa, Ernest, 72, 82, 281, 392,
443-44, 445, 446, 447, 448, 449, 453
451 Ficino, Marsilio, 126, 129
Economic Democracy, 160, 207— Fielding, Henry, 200, 384, 457
212, quoted 208, 209, 210-11 Fiorentino, Francesco, 61
Douglas, Gavin, Eneados, 324, 386, Fisher, Irving, 182
394 Stabilised Money, 279n, quoted
Drummond, John, 167n, 306n 273
Dryden, John, 390, 391 Fisk, Jim, 170
Duchamp, Marcel, 457 Fitzgerald, Edward, 198
Duhamel, Georges, 363, 370, 416 Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam, 198
Duns Scotus, Johannes, 150, 155 Flaubert, Gustave, 115, 135, 149, 152,
Diirer, Albrecht, 115, 116, 268 155, 157, 166, quoted 189, 190, 195,
200, 332, 384
Florentine Academy, 129
Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovyer de,
 
Eddy, Mary Baker, 102 155
Edison, Thomas Alva, 224 Ford, Ford Madox, 318, $19, 398, 431,
Edward VIT, 115 461-63
Egoist, The, 405 Ancient Lights, 462
Einstein, Albert, 282 Heart of the Country, 432
Einzig, Paul, 271 The Fifth Queen, 462
Eleusis, 53, 55, 56, 58, 59 Women and Men, 463
Eliot, T. S., 53, 61, 77n, 163, quoted Ford, Henry (1), 177, 256n, 436
164, 227, 230, $17, 318, 319, 320-1, Fortnightly Review, The, 418
524, 389-99, 414, 435, 454, 460, Fort, Paul, 413, 422
463, 464 Forum, 359n
After Strange Gods, T7n, 320 Fra Angelico, 24
Selected Essays, passim 389-99 France, Anatole, 418, 463
The Rock, 77n Franklin, Benjamin, 148, 945
Eluard, Paul, 287 Frazer, Sir George, 55
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 102, quoted Frederick 11, Hohenstaufen, 205
103 French Revolution, The, 298
irvcinesadion, , 148, 149, 151, Freud, Sigmund, 59, 154, 994, 434
e The, 18 19, 131 Frobenius, Leo, 60, 76, 148, 149, 227,
English Journal, The, 165 Tm o N
English Review, The, 404 vo :
E Erlebte Erdteile, 331
pete Jeon = Front, 58n i
le ” Frost, Robert, 421
Erigena, Scotus, quoted 61, 67, 76, Funk, Walther, 311
78, 282
Ernst, Max, 394, 456
d‘Este, Parasina, 169, 169
Euclid, 27, 274, 276, 304
Future, The, 378n, 384n
European, The, 352n Galdos, Benito Pérez, 189, 195, 831
Exile, The, 214n, 216n, 217n, 222n, Galileo, 65, 264
224n, 452 Galla Placidia, Empress, $22
468

INDEX
 
Gallatin, Albert, 155 Harper and Co., 112
Galsworthy, John, 462 Harper's Magazine, 112
Gardener, Edmund, 38 Hardy, Thomas, 432, 461, 463
Gaudier—Brzeska, Henri, 81, 228, 230, A Group of Noble Dames, 432
233, quoted 420, 427, 456, 457, 458, The Mayor of Casterbridge, 432
459 Haussman, Baron George Eugéne,
Gautier, Théophile, 164, 318, 321, 224
324, 384, 384, 385 Hawthome, Nathaniel, 114
George, Henry, 281 Hazard Circular, The, quoted 340,
Gerlach, 190 quoted 344
Gesell, Silvio, 157, 160, 183, 272-82, Hazlitt, William, 396, 399
295-296, 414, 315, 316, 329-330, Hegel, G. W. F., 87
347—8, 438, 439, 444—45 Heine, Heinrich, 30, 373
The Natural Economic Order, 160, Helios, 48, 404
183, 272-82 Hemingway, Ernest, 58
Gibbs, Philip, 348 Henry, O., 396
Gide, André, 287 Kang Hi, 66
Giles, Herbert, 82 St. Hilaire, Church of (Poitiers), 265
San Giorgio, Banca di, 270, 310 Hindooism, 67
Gladstone, W. E., 43 Hitler, Adolf, 2M, 297, 299, 343
Goddeschalk, Sequaire, 418, 422 Mein Kampf, quoted 299
Golding, Arthur, Metamorphoses Hobson, S. G., quoted 298-9
(Ovid), 324, 394 Hogarth, William, 457
Goldring, Douglas, 463 Hohenzollern, The, 201
Goldsborough, Congressman, 268, Hokusai, 24, 115
280 Hollis, Christopher, The Two Na-
Goncourts, the, 149, 157, 166 tions, 160, 326, 338
Goste, Edmund, 378 Homer, 29, 30, 31, 32, 146, quoted
Gould, Jay, 170 150, 251, 248, 285, $18, $24, 328,
Gourmont, Remy de, quoted 1%, 390, 462
287, 870, 413-28, quoted 419, The Odyssey, 29-80, 129, 268, 390
433, 434, quoted 435, 443 Hoover, President Herbert, 147, 268,
Chevaux de Diomèdes, 414, quoted 439
417, 421 Hopkins, G. M., 461
Le Latin Mystique du Moyen Age, Horace, 41
414, 418, 422 Hosie, Lady, 95
Livres de Litanies, $70, 418, 422 Hotep, Amen, 51
Les Saints de Paradis, 418 Howells, William Dean, 113
Sonnets in Prose, 418, quoted 419 Hudson, W. H., 318, 429-32, 463
Goya Francisco, 323, 426 The Naturalist in La Plata, 429
Grant, Ulysses 8., 147, 180 quoted 429-430
Greenwood, Ernest, 223 The Shepherd's Life, 429, 431
Grey, of Falloden, Edward, Viscount, Hugo, Victor, 372, 416
153, 157 Hulme, T. E., quoted 328
Griffith, Arthur, quoted 239 Hume, David, 153, 157, 255, quoted
Groseteste, Robert, Bishop of Lin- 259, 259-60, 263, 323
coln, 76, 95, 320 The Balance of Trade, quoted 263
Essay on Money, quoted 259
Hwuy, King, 86, 87, 91
Habsburgs, The, 228
Hackett, Dr., 265
Hamilton, Alexander, 169, 180, 338
Harding, Warren Gamaliel, 147, 219, Thbotson, Joseph Darling, $19
268 Thsen, Henrik, 207, 421
469

INDEX
LGL Lid, 313 Kimball, Dexter, 183, 349, 441
Ikleheimer, Messrs. Morton, Van Industrial Economics, 183
Gould, 310, S11, 339 Kipling, Rudyard, 54, 78, 110, 128,
Ingres, J. D. A., 455 199, 218, 451
Irving, Washington, 114 The Night Mail, quoted 199,
Itow, Miscio, 418-19 quoted 218
Kitasono, Katue, 285
Kitson, Arthur, 179, 339, 341, 448
Koran, The, 66, 68
Jackson, Andrew, 165, 178, 179, 180, Koré, 48
183, 207, 309, quoted $16, 338, 354, Kreuger, Ivar, 106, 249, 301
385 uDl
K , Mi .. 222
feno, Ho, iain ig C r. e0
147, 148, 153, 155, 156, 158, 163. Kamisada. 495 di
, 189, ted 189-90, 195, r Chan ¥ »
bod 463 πα i Kutsugen (Ch‘u Yuan), 376
A Bundle of Letters, quoted 189-
x
The American, 115
Crapy Cornelia, 115
Portrait of a Lady, 115
The Tragic Muse, 189
The Turn of the Screw, 189
Jammes, Trancis, 413, 422
Lamb, Charles, 378, 396
Landor, W. S., 158, 200, 378, 384-8,
392
Pericles and Aspasia, 385, 987
Imaginary Conversations, quoted
Jefferson, Thomas, 82, 147-58, 385-6, 387
quoted 159, 160, 161, 162, 165, 170, Larranaga, P. J., 160, 326
174, 180, 182, 234, 243, 246, 247, Gold, Glut and Government, 160
255, quoted 256, 268, 296, 314, Latimer, Hugh, 265
quoted 326, 338, 353, 449 Laughlin, James, 451, 454, 460n
Jesuits, The, 65, 66, $15 Laurencin, Marie, 434
Johnson, President Andrew, 179 Law, John, 267
Johnson, The Rev. Hewlitt, 64 Lawrence, D. H., 369, 463
Johnson, Jack, SE Layamon, Brut, 319
Johnson, Lionel, 462 League of Nations, The, 300
Johnson, R. U., 132, 153 Le Gallienne, Richard, 133
Jouve, P. |., 370, 416 Leger, Fernand, 257-8
Joyce, James, 163, 227, $17, 400, 414, Legge, Janes, 97, 332
450, 455, 457 Lehman, Governor Herbert, 442
Chamber Music, 455 Leibnitz, G. W., 57, 61, 67, 78, 87,
Dubliners, 455 , 230
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Lenin, 162, 217, 228, 282, quoted
Man, 400, 455 298-9, quoted 300
Ulysses, 163, 450 Imperialism, the Highest Stage of
Judaism, 57, 216 Capitalism, quoted 298-9
Juno, H9 Leo X, Pope, 57, 62, 150
fustinian, 90, 150, 156 Leonardo da Vinci, 318
Leopardi, Giacomo, 50
Leopold T, Grand Duke of Tuscany,
177
Kalenda Maya, 58 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 303
Kang Hi, 66 Lewis, Wyndham, see Wyndham
Keats, John, 35, 158, 878 Lewis
Keynes, J. M., 207, 208, 215, 262 {Li Ki), The Book of Rites, 87
470

INDEX
 
 
Lincoln, Abraham, 83, quoted 117, Maria in Trastevere, Santa (Rome),
159, 160, 175, 178, 179, quoted 310, 320
310n, quoted 326, 341 Marinetti, F. T., 107, 396, 456, 459
Lindbergh, Charles A., 339 Marlowe, Christopher, 386
Lin Yutang, 92, 96 Marvoil, Arnaut de, 26, 43
Li Po (Rihaku), 376, 394 Marx, Karl, 76, 87, 154, 155, 162, 165,
Little Review, The, 210n, 287, 424, 299, 245, 268, 278, 274, 278, 280,
429n, 452 282, 307, 307n, 346, 444
Lloyd George, David, 232 Das Kapital, quoted 307, 307n
Lobero, Antonio, 310 Maspero, Gaston, 55
Loeb Report, The, 177 Mathews, Elkin, 227
Londres, Albert, 445 Matisse, Henri, £25, 456
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 124 Maupassant, Guy de, 462
Evangeline, 124 Mazarin, Cardinal Jules, 217
Hiawatha, 124 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 312, 314, 351
Tales of a Wayside Inn, 124 The Duties of Man, quoted 312,
Longinus, 35, 112 351
Lope de Vega, Felix, 24, 272 Medici, Cosimo, 270
Nuevo Mundo, 272 Medici, ‘The, 126, 270, 281
Louis XIV, 279 Melcagar (hero), 40
Loy, Mina, 424—5 Meleager (poet), 35
Luchini, Alberto, 322 Mellon, Andrew William, 229, 249,
Ludwig, Emile, 261, 266 439
Luther, Martin, 57, 62, 210, 278 Memling, Hans, 24
Memmi, Simone, 323
Mencius, 81, 97, $18, $28, 350, 853
Menelek, King, 33
McAlmon, Robert, 399 Mercure de France, 414, 420
MeCormick, 499 Merejkowski, Dmitri, 28
MacDaniel, W., 319 Metternich, Prince C. L. W., 155
Machiavelli, Niccolo, quoted 38, 222, Michaelson, 57
405, quoted 312, quoted 331 Michelet, Jules, 149, 167, 304
Mackail, John William, 462 Mill, J. S., 307, 331, 346
McKinley, President William, 78, 147 Miller, Professor, 396
Macmillan Commission, The, 442 Milton, John, 38, 384, 390, 391,
MeNaîr Wilson, R., 160, 299, 326 quoted 392, 397
Promise to Pay, 160, 326 Mimmil, Thibaudet de, 422
Mint of Massachusetts, The, 183
Mithras, 55, 56, 58
Mohammed, 194
Mohammedans, 52, 76, 216, 251
Mond, Alfred, 313
Monet, Claude, 24
Montaigne, Michel de, 158, 453
Madison, James, 182, 314
Maeterlinck, Maurice, 413
Mahabharata, The, 79
Mahl, William, Two Plays of the So-
cial Comedy, 182
Malatesta, Sigismondo, 230
 
 
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 168, 420, 434, Monte dei Paschi (Bank), 61, 270,
451 . 308, $10, 939
Malleon, Savari de, 105 Monticello, 144
Malthus, T. R., 245, 341 Moore, Marianne, 396-7, 399, 400,
Manet, Edouard, 163, 318, 334 494-5
Manichaeans, The, 58, 59 Moreri, Louis, 154
Manning, Frederick, 161 Morgan, J. P., 127, 171
Mantegna, Andrea, 334 Moring, Alexander, 395
Mantini, Simone (Memmi), 523 Mor! V., 589
Maoris, 60 Morosini, Barton, 267, 310
471

INDEX
 
Morrison, Robert, 82 Ovid, 32, 53, quoted 72, 286, 318, 324,
Moscophorus, 51 328, 386, 394
Moses, 65, 95, 298, 300 Oxford University, 137
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 31
Munson, 436
Munsterburg, 191 Page, Walter, 153
Murray, Sir James, 197 Palladio, 106
Mussolini, Benito, 230, 232, 261, Papen, F. Von, 278
quoted 261-2, 277, 279, 294, quoted Paris, Gaston, 138
298, 299, quoted 300, 313, 340, 343, Parkhurst, Charles Henry, 106
438, 440, 442, 444, 446 Paterson, William, 176, 290, quoted
308, 337-8, 343
Pauthier, Guillaume, 82
Napoleon, 126, 158, 201, 217, 270, Pea, Enrico, 418
313, 322 Moscardino, 318
Napoleonic Wars, The, 177, 200, 338, Pericles, 23
384 Perley, Samuel, 3191
Nation, The, 223 Persephone, $27
Necker, Jacques, 301 St, Peter's (Rome), 57, 62
neschek, 65, 298 Petrarch, Francesco, 54
New Age, The, 2in, 49n, %, 189n, Phidias, 51
193n, 196n, 199n, 204n, 229, 332, Philips, Graham, 116
363n, 37In, 374n, 407n, 426n, 437, Picabia, Francis, 287, 457, 458, 459,
450 460n
Newbolt, Sir Henry, 210, 462 Picasso, Pablo, 427, 455, 458, 459
New Democracy, 441 Pickthall, Marmaduke William, 450
New Directions, 434n Pico della Mirandola, 25, 129, 151
New English Weekly, The, 262, 265n, Mier della Francesca, 318
267n, 209n—300n, 433n, 437n, 439 Pigou, Arthur, Cecil, 204, 215
New Review, The, 54n Pih Kwei, 92
Nicholas V, Pope, 129, 318, 328 Pindar, 35
Nicholson, William, 426 Pirandello, Luigi, 434-5
Nickisch, M., 31 E aA {
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 421 e vc
Nineteenth Century and After, The, Pisistratus, 994
46ln à E4
a . Pitt-Rivers, Augustus Lane-Fox, 60
Nos, (Suma Gengi), 72 Plarr, Victor Gustave, 361
Nonnus, (poet), 70 d
North American Review, The, 147n Plate, £7, 86,94, 408
Northcliffe, Alfred Lord, 404 Pleiade, The, 334
Northern Pacific Railroad, The, 171 Pleton, Gemisto, 87
Poe, E., A., 432
Poetry, 420n
Orage, A, R., 79, 299, quoted 291, Polo, Marco, 204—6
433, 436, 437-50 The Travels of Marca Polo,
Orsini, The, 126 quoted 204-5
Otis, James, 174 Pope, Alexander, 29, 41
Overholser, Willis A.. 160, 310, 323, Pound, Ezra, A.B.C, of Economics,
339 274, 277
History of Money in the U. S., 160, Active Anthology, 889n, 399-400
quoted 310, 339, 340n The Cantos, 25n, 29n, 38n, 43n,
Overstone, Samuel Jones Loyd, 58n, 58n, 6In, 64n, 7In, 72n, 35n,
Baron, quoted 408, 309, quoted Yın, 172n, 179, 270n, 274n,
389-40 283n, quoted 313, quoted $39,
472

INDEX
Pound, Ezra (Continued) Riccardi, 311
353n, 408n, 417n, 492n, 436n, Richard I, Cocur de Lion, 26
458n Richard of St. Victor, quoted 71-2,
Canzoni, 24
The Guide to Kulchur, quoted 77, $22, 333
Benjamin Minor, 77
 
 
200n, 333n dhe e .
Homage to Sextus Propertius, 227 ΡΟ, 333 a, 217
hoe hla Rural u Rihaku (Li Po), 376, 394
Jefierson and/or Mussolini, 160 Rimbaud, Arthur, 371
n Ritter, Fernando, 181, 185, 346
Make It New, $23 Robertson; Sparrow, 440
Moeurs Contemporaines, 227 Robespierve,M M., quoted 298
DA eee ae Romains, Jules, 308,365, $70, 416
Guie Pauper Antaut, 227 Roman Empire, The, 157, 273, 915,
The Seafarer, 26, 39, quoted 123, 316
449 » »
Social Credit: An Impact, 2100, ROME HSE 190, 260, 204
quoted 442n i ro I di de cl
The Spirit of Romance, 24 à 3
Pound, Homer, 120 Rol?s;¡;:lg. Theodore, 78, 115, 129,
Pound, T. C., 325 en n
> x Roscelin, Johannes, 20
Priestley, Joseph, quoted by John Rosem, Pi 6. 06 —
a de, 193 Rossetti, Gabriele, Mistero dell‘Amor
Propertius, Sextus, quoted 29, 150, Platonico, 320
272, 286, 924, 328, 390 Rossetti, William Michael, 112
Protestantism, 57, 64, 67, 176, 273, Rossoni, Edmondo, 89, 300, quoted
317, 321 — = ea
Proudhon, Pierre Joseph, 440 Rostand, Maurice, Marchands de
Proust, Marcel, 272 Canons, 288
sve δὰ la ay Rothschilds, The, 181, 182, 265, 292,
Provence; 20 50, 00, 200, 519, 297, 310, 311, 314, 327, 339, S44,
Ptolemies, The, 128 447
pulci, Luigi, 95 Rouse, W. H. D., 268, 393
Putnam, S., 398 . Rousseau, J. J., 158, 196
P mn-¡h!ng.;;wn % Rowlandson, Thomas, 457
Pythagoras, Rudel, Jaufre, 26
Rudge, Olga, 434n
Rush, Benjamin, 313n
Russell, Peter, 169n, 174n, 306n,
Quadrigesimo Anno, 78 386n
Quakers, The, 67, 216 Russian Revolution, The, 214, 228
Querschnitt, Der, 78n Ruskin, John, 224
Q, Xtius Decimus, 155
Rabelais, Francois, 109, 154, 204, 304 Sabatte, 130
Rachilde, Mme, 288 Sacerdotesse, 56
Raeburn, Sir Henry, 301 Sachs, Hans, 324
Raphael, 24 Salel, Hugues, 394
Regnier, Henry de, 413 Salmasius, Claudius, 65, 272-3, 311,
Reinach, S., 138 323
Manual of Classical Philology, 138 De Modo Usurarum, 323
Rembrandt, van Rijn, 24, 360 Sappho, 30, quoted ΑἹ, 324
473

INDEX
 
Sassoons, The, 344 Swift, Jonathan, Gulliver‘s Travels,
Saturday Evening Post, 166, 301 400
Saviotti, Gino, 334 Swinburne, A, C., H0, 321, 385, 422-
Difesa della Poesia di Francesco 3
Petrarca, 334 Synge, J. M., 371
Schacht, H, H. G., 278
Scheiwiller, G., 318
Schwob, Marcel, 146
Scribner's, 133 Tacitus, 286, 361, 462
Seafarer, The, 26, 39, 450 Taft, William Howard, 218, 219, 220
Seneca, 393, 394, quoted 396, quoted Tailhade, Laurent, 413
Talmud, The, 68
Senecas, The, 114 Taney, Roger Brooke, 179
Sewanee Review, The, 464n ‘T'ang Emperors, The, 298, 343
de vnem Ralpn Ftetcher Tang, Tching, 292, 295
Shakespeare, William, 30, 41, 65, 109, ___ qankerville, Lord. 451
146, 158, 287, 323, quoted 347,
quoted 361, 392, 394, 453
Shaw, G. B., 125, 196, 210, 433, 453,
Taoism, 67
Tasso, Torquato, 54
Taupin, Professor René, 391—2
 
Shelley, P. n., 158, $78,386 CU
Shepherd, W. P., 319 Tehing Tang, 292, 295
Sherman, John, $10, $11, 339 Thing, Yong, 66, 68
Shun, Emperor, 85, 86, 89 ‘Tehon, Counsellor, quoted 318
Signorelli, Luca, 425 T. C. P. (Fhaddeus Colman Pound),
Sismondi, Jean, 125 325
History of the Malian Republics Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 114, 378,
in the Middle Ages, 125 384, 386, 390
Stominsky, Henry, 230 Terracina, 45, 53, 58, 60, 320
Smiles, Samuel, 196 Tertullian, Quintus Septimum
Smith, Adam, quoted 176, 183, Florens, 415, 431
quoted 209, quoted 210, quoted Thales, 172, 176, 181
217, quoted 281, quoted 280 Theocritus, 146
Smollett, Tobias, 457 ‘Theresa, St., of Avila, 50
Social Credit, 440 Thiers, Louis Adolphe, 354
Socialism, 130 ‘Thompson, Francis, 137, 382
Socrates; 140 The Hound of Heaven, 138
e le >
Se ὍΠΗ, Tinkham, George, 267
a en s Tinto, Edoardo, 54, 55
Sophokles, 35, 436n
Women of Trachis, 4360
Sordello (poet), 322
Sparta, 150
Tour du Pin, La, Marquis, 154, 155,
268, 272, 280, 209n—300n
Townsman, The, 70n, 303
 
Spengler, Oswald, 227 Trial of Barrés, The, 237
Spinoza, Baruch de, 360 Trollope, Anthony, 64, 152, 153, 155,
Sprague, O. M. W., 268 318
Stalin, Joseph, 342 The Warden, 318
Standard Oil Company, The, 57 ‘Tuan Szetsun, 95
Steffens, Lincoln, quoted 217 Turgenev, Ivan, 115, 166, 189, 195,
Stendhal, 149, 200, 334, 384, 455 414
Sterne, Laurence, 400, quoted 421 Nichée de Gentilshommes, 189,
Tristram Shandy, 400 414
Suma Gengi (Noh), 79 Smoke, 189
Swallou, Auguste, 422 Trara, T., 287
474

INDEX
Uccello, Paolo, 424, 427 Wan, King, 85, 83, 89
University of Paris, 133 Wanderer, The, 123
Unterguggenberger, 292 Washington, George, 66, 159, 168,
Upward, Allen, 403-12, quoted 403, 180, 228, 314
quoted 407-8, quoted 409-10 Webb, Sir Montague, 339
The Divine Mystery, quoted 403, Webbs, The, 210
405, 408 Webster, Daniel, 121, 179
The New Word, 405, quoted 407-8 Webster, John, 381
Wells, H. G., 433, 453, 463
Whistler, James, 24, 115, 116, 117,
124, 163, 418
Whitman, Walt, 110, 112, 114,
quoted 123, 124, 145-6, 164
Valery, Paul, 432-3
Valla, Lorenzo, 129, 130, 150
Valli, Luigi, 56, 59
Van Buren, Martin, 82, 148, 155, 157,
à Whitney, Richard, 258
164, 165, 170, 178, 179, 179n, 180, hit
! à William 11 (German emperor) , 129
Ba gu 246, 247, 258, 288 309, — Wittiams, William Carlos, 164, 899,
. 400, 437
vin Rees 1 Gas Wilson, Thomas Woodrow, 158, 210,
: ν 14, 135, 219, 243
Van der Gould, 310
Van Gogh, Vincent, 427
Velasquez, Diego, 24, 51, 115, 116,
318, 399
Venice, 155, 176
Ventadom, Bernart de, 26
Wodehouse, P. G., 218
Woërgl, 276, 280, 314
Woodward, F. S., 281, 282
Canada Reconstructed, 281
Woodward, W. E., quoted 169,
 
d 282
Venus, 48, 53 y Dar . Z
» oti A New American History, quoted
Vergennes, Comte de, 315 169
Verhaeren, Emile, 191
Verlaine, Paul, 371
Vickers, Messrs,, 222
Vidal, Pierre, 42, quoted 45
Vildrac, Charles, τομ; aa ak T 463
Villon, Frangois, 24, 28, 30, 43, . —
141, 146, 200, 231, quoted 273, APSO EE MOT
. last, 452-60
318, 824, S71, 873, 390, 458 Cantleman’s Spring Mate, 163
Le Testament, 390 > TA 7
Virgil, 285, 924, 361, 886 Bashy of the Sear OES
sc Hitler, 299
Vitruvius, 106 Tarr, 457
Vivante, Leone, 84, 87 Cone
Originalità nel Pensiero, 87 Timon of Athens, 376
Viaminck, Maurice de, 325
Wordsworth, William, 378, 384
Wu Yung, 928-9
Wyndham Lewis, 81, 227, 230, 299,
317, 376, 400, 414, 426-8, 452-60,
Vogelweide, W. von, 324 Yeats, John B., quoted 452
Volstead, Andrew J., 219 Yeats, W. B., 38, 76, 146, 231, quoted
Voltaire, F. M. Arouet de, 150, 151, 319, 994, 435, 461
154, 155, 167, 200, 204, 208, 210, Yong Tching, 66, 68
300n, 384, 409, 418 Vsaye, Eugine, 31
Candide, 151, 208 Yu, Emperor, 92
Dictionnaire Philosophique, 154
Voorhis, Jerry, 160, 310n, 340n Zaharolf, Sir Basil, 222, 267
Zola, Emile, 199
 
 
Wadsworth, Edward, 376 Zublay, John Joachim, 181-2, quoted
Wagner, Richard, 38 182
Wallace, Edgar, 92, 231, quoted 450 Zukofsky, Louis, 164, 325, 399, 400
Walpole, Hugh, 463 Meet Baruch Spinoza, 164
475

 

w Mirections Faperbooks—A Partial Listing
ex Abish, How German Js (2, NDPS08 Jot Hawkes, The Becile Leg. NDP239,
“Allman, Seenurios for a Mixed Landscape Humors of Blood & Skin. NDPST?
DP619 Second Skin, NDP146.
ne Andrews, The Surrealist Parade, NDP6S9 Sammocl Hazo, Te Paris. NDPSIZ
d Antin, Taning. NDPSJ0 H. D. Callecred Poews. NDPOLL
poliimaire, Selected Writings. * NDPS10 The Gift, NDPS46.
ny S. Baca, Martin de Medirazions, NDPGS Helen in Egspt. NDPD
ack Mesa Poents, NDP676. HERmiome. NDPS26.
 
nes, Nighrwoot NDPOS.
 
An Essay on French Verse. NDPTOR, Tribwse 10 Freud. NDPS72
Bates, Elephants Nest ina Rhubarb Tree, NDP66% Robert E. Helbling. Heinrich vow Xileist. NDP390.
 
Party for the Girls, NDP&S3 William Herrick, Love and Terrur NDPS3
Baudelaire, Fluwers of Evil + NDPGS4 Herman Hesse, Siddthartha. NDPOS
ris Spieen. NDP2M.
Dan, lid Same NDPT27
 
Mhe Movel. NDPTOS.
Mo, Selecird Poerry NDPS20.
 
 
 
 
 
 
ves NDPG93 C: hierwnoë, All ihe Comapirators. NDPSRO
fried Benn, Priva! Virion. NDP322 The Berlin Stories, NDPI34
ne! Bird, The Muebird Café. NDPTO7. Ledo Ivo, Smake’t Nese. NDPS21
Blackmor, Sradiex in Henr Famer, NDPSS2 Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka, NDPM
igang Worchert. The Man Outside. NDP31Y. Alfred Jarry, Ubw Roi, NDPIOS.
e Luis Borges, Lañvrinttr. NDPIS6 Robenson Jeffers, Camifor and Medes. NDP203
ven Nighrs, NDPST6. BS Johnson, Christie Malry. ... NDP600
Boyle. Life Being the Best. NDP6S4 Albert Angelo. NDP628
ree Shor? Novels, NDPTOS James koyce, Stephen Hero, NDPI33
tha, Tae Dhammupudu, NDP188 Fraoz Katka. Amerika. NDPII7.
ulgakou, Might & Bliss. NDPS9S Bob Kaufinas, The Ancient Rain. NDPSI4
de of M. de Moliere. NDP6DI H. von Kleist, Prince Friedrick. NDPS62
ade Busch, Absent Friends, NDPT2L Shimpei Kusano, Asting Merelf,. NDPS66
| Canetti, fellow Street. NDPTO9. Jules Laforgue, Moral Tales. NDPS
sio Cantenal, Zero Hour. NDPSO2. P. Lal, Great Sanskrit Plas, NDP142
e Cary, A House of Children. NDP63L Tomması Landolfi, Gogol's Wife. NDP1SS
ister Johnson, NDP631 “Language” Powtries: Aw Anthology. NDP630.
fen Cacruth. Tell Me Again. ... NDP677 D Larsen, Stitching Porcelain. NDP710
s-Ferdinand Céhine. Lauiréamoat, Maldorey. NDP207.
th on the Instailment Plux. NDP330 Irving Layion, Srlectesd Poemx, NDPA3
urney to the End of the Nighr. NDPSA2 Christine Lebner, Expecting. NDPS44
Chat. Selected Puems.? NDPT34 H. Lembowite, Fabricating Lives, NDPT1S.
Coctews, The Holy Terrors. NDP2I2 Seegfried Lenz. The German Lesson. NDPOLS.
collas, She Was æ Querx. NDPTI6 Denise Levertoy, Breathing the Water. NDPE40
Comnan, San Rock Man, NDP3IB ‘Candles ἐν Babylon. NDPS33
ory Corsa. Lowy Live Man. NDPI2 A Dow iv the Hive. NDP68S.
raidof the Ausachthonte Spirit NDPS22 Poems 1960-1967 NDPS&9.
Creeley, Memory Gardews: NDPOIS Poems 1968-1972. NDP629
indows. NDP6R Oblique Prayers, NDPS73
ard Dahiber sg ικα) Wins Flesh. NDP222. Marry Leven, James Joyee. NDPST
a Dassélou. Tie Wey to the Labyrinth, NDP634 Li Ch'ing-chao, Complete Porms, NDP402
nu Duzai. The Serting Sam, NDP258. Enrique Lihn, The Dark Rrom.t NDPS42,
] Human, NDP3ST. C- Lispector, Soulrtore. NDP6TI
. de Lafayette, The Princess af Cleves. NDP660. The Hour of the Sear. NDP,
ujardin, Ve “I ro the Wirody No More. NDPOR2. Garess Lorea, Five Plays, NDP232
rt Duncan, Grownut Work. NDPS?2 The Pablic d Play Wirhowr a Tirle. NDPS6L
ound Work (1 In the Dart. NDPGST. Selected Powses.* NDPAIS
ard Eberhart, The Lowe Reach. NDPSOS Three Tragedies, NDPS2
e7To .1..9&;… NDP204. Francesco G. Lorca. In The Green Morning. NDPOIL
sions of Pastoral. Michael McClure, Rebel Lions, NDP712
Stained Glass Elegies, NDPES. Selected Poems. NDPS#.
Everson, The Residual Years. NDP263 ‘Carson McCulters, The Member af the
a Ewart, Selected Poems, NDPSSS ‘Wedding. (Playsceipe} NDPLS3
ene Feclinghort, Endless Life. NDPSI6, Stéphane Mallarme,* Selected Portry and
Caney Lilend of the Mind. NDP74. rose. NDPS24.
ropean Porms & Fransirions. NDPS82 Thossas Mertos. Avian Journat. NDP3%4
rrère from San Françireu, NDP220 New Seeds nf Cantemplamon, ND33?.
id Dreams of a New Beginning. NDP663, Selected Poems, NDPSS
Id Forbank, Fire Novels. NDPSEL Thomas Merton in Alaska. NDPOS2
ree More Novelr_NDP614 The Way of Chany Tzu, NDP276,
oft Fitzgerald, The Crack-ap. NDPSS, The Wisdom of the Desert. NDP295.
ave Flaubert, Dierhonary. NDP2¥) Zen and the Birds of Appetite. NDP261
Sagan, Did Guitar Mahler Sti? NDPTI2, Menri Michaux. A Barbarian in Aske. NDP622
hi. Gamdhé on Non: Violence. NDPI9T, Selected Writings, NDP264,
Romain, Promise as Dumn. NDP63S. Hency Miller, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare
e Life Before Us ("Madame Rosa"), SDP6OM NDP30;
eshandie, Fuutity. NDPT22 Big Sur & The Oranges. NDPEBL
he. Fowst, Parti, NDPTO. The Colossia of Marvussi. NDPTS
y Green, Back. NDPSI7 Into the Heart af Life. NDPT28
| Grossman, Phe Ether Dome. NDP723. The Sevile at the Foot of the Ladder. NDP386,
in Gramek. Shadowlifé. NDPT0S Stand Srill Like the Hummingbird, NDP236
onnat. Meszi, Duemon in Lishuania, NDPS92 The Time of the Assassins. NDPI1S
Gustafsson, The Death of a Beekeeper. NDPS23. ¥. Mishima, Confessions of a Mark. NDP253
vies of Happy People. NDPSt6. Dear in Midsummer, NDP2IS.
complete listing request free catalog from
Directions, 86 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011

ic Mistral, The Memoirs. NDP632 Dara Saitenbo ey of an Amorous
cted Pocmus ? NDPI93 » Cross, Powses t NDP34L
 
 
jorazd.. Fancy Goods / Open Alt Night Madness in the Family. NDPS9L
t e saztre, Newsea. ΝΌΡΕΣ.
it Nabokov, Nitolai Gopal, WDP78 il (Iurimaczyi. NDP272
ater in the Dark. NI ois, Coming to Jakarta. NDP672.
Real kr of Sebastian Knight. NDP432, wore Schwartz, Selected Poems. NDP241
ida, The Capraín s Verses.t NDP34S ast de Lost Porm. NDPOT3.
dence on Earth. * NDP340. Shan Drews Begin br gen a NDP4S4
rections in Prose de Poerry (Anthology) attan, Manimelhalat
labile frown #17 forward to #55. K. Shiraishi, Seasons of Sacred Last, NDP4S3
Nichols, Arrival. NDP431 Stevie Smith. Collected Poems. NDPS62
r. NDP4BS. re Seletteg Premo. NDP69
ms, The Six-Cornered Sacrfake, NDPI00 GuLsn)du_ The Back Cowerry, NDP249,
s Olson, Selected See eae
Nsom. The Life of Jeras. Wave. —
Noes. ToriteIstend. ΧΏΡΑΙ
Collected Poems. NDPSIE Enid Staskie, Rimbaud. NDP2S4
The Flower Show | Steothal Three Mallon Chronicles, ΜΌΡΙΟΝ,
Tosk Family, NDPS36 ‘Antonie Tabucchi, Indiar Noctrme. NDP66S.
d Owen. Collected Poems. NDP2IO Nathaniel Tarn, Lyrics... Bride of God. NDP391
mili Pacheco, Barifes ¿n rhe Desert. NDPOST. Dylan Thomas. Advenmures in the Skin Trade
cred Poems. + NDPSIS NDPI83
»e Puera, Antipoens: New £ Selected. NDP6DI A Child's Chrisrmas in Wales. NDP181
Pastecnal, Safe Conduct. NDP??. Collected Pers 1934-1952, NDP3I6.
ih Paichen, Afume and Afun. ΝΌΡΣΣ Collected Stories. NDP626,
3 Portrait ofthe Ariat as Young Dog: NDP
Quite Barty One Morning,
Under Milk Wood. NDP73.
Tian Wer. A Chinese Book of Origins. NDP624
vel, How 1 Came to Know Fish. NDPTE3. Uwe Timm, The Snake Tree. NDI
o Paz. Collected Poems. NDPTI9, Lionel Trifling, &M. Forster. NDPIRD
fgurutions.? NDP303. Tu Fu, Selected Poems. NDPSTS.
aft of Shadnes. ! NDPAÏ9 N Tocei, The Roin Came Le NDPGRE
cred Poeres. NDPSTA. Martin Twmell, Baudefuire. NDP336
aome ! NDPT3S Paul Valéry Selected Wririmgs 4 NDPI84.
ee Within. * NDPéél Bio Vittorie, A Virroriné Ommibus. NDP366
n Perse, Selected Poems * NDPS4$ Roamarie Waldrop, The Reproduction of Profiles,
orter, Eelgrass. NDP438 NDP649.
baad. ABC of Reading: NOPOR Robert Penn Warren, At Heaven's Gate, NDPSSS.
fuctws. NDP: Vernon Warkins, Selected Poems, NDP22L.
fuctas to Cummings. (Anth. } NDPI26. Eliot Weinberger, Works an Paper. NDP62T
raft of XXX Cantos, NDPSIO Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyheurrs &
ıra. NDP683 Day of the Locust. NDPIZS,
le io Kadchur. NDP2ST. 1. Wheelwright. Collected Poems. NDPS44.
ary Essays, NDF290 ‘Tennessee Williams, Baby Doll, NDPTI4.
NoPSGT Camino Real. NDP301
reed Cantos. NDP3OM Cat on @ Hot Tin Roof. NDP398.
cted Pores. NDP66. Clothes for a Summer Hotel. NDPSS6
Spirit of Romance. NDP266, The Glass Menagerie. NDP218.
stations 1 (Enlarged Edition) NDPIAS. Hard Candy. NDP225
ind Queneau, The Alue Flowers. NDPS9$ Inthe Winter of Cities. NDPISS.
cise ine Style NDPSI3 A Lovely Sends for Creve Όροι ΝΌΜΟΣ
le Rachewiltz, Ezra Pound. NDPAOS Other Stories. NDP237,
40, Kaxthapura. NDP224 Ret eri Barsers Sigs. NDP650
1 Read, The Green Child. NDP208 A Streetcar Named Desire. NDPSO
dy, Selected Poems. t NDP346. Sweet Bird of Yowab, NDP409.
th Rexroth, An Autobiographical Novel. NDPT2S Twenty-Seven Full of Cotton. NDP2I7
μέρα Revisited. NDPS2L Views Carre. NDP&R2,
Classics Revisited, NDPSSS. ‘William Certos Walliams,
ver Wreath Mill, NDPT24 The Απομοριίο,
Poems frase the Chinese. NDPI92 The Buildup. NDP259.
Poems from the + NoPiAT Collected — iui 1 nprmo
cted Porat. NDPSRL Cotlecied Poems: Val. 1E NOPT3
ver Poets of China. NDPS28, The Doctor Stories, NDPS8S,
n Poers NDPSI7 Imaginations. NDP329.
Maria Rilke, from In the American Grain. NDPS3.
‘Hours, NDP408 In the Money. NDP240.
s «ΜΗΝΑ (Proo), NDPIGA Pctaresfome Brueghel, NEÍIS
re Silence Rei . Pictures ei. NOPII
Rimbava, Illuminations + NDPS6. Selected Poems (new ed.). NDPOI2
on in Heil & Druskes Bou ! NDPST. White Mule. NDP226.
nd Rodi, Delights of Turkey, NDS Wisdom Books: Early Buddhists. NDPS44;
+ Rotbenberg. . NDPSI9, Mystics, : St Francis. NDPST7;
Selected Poems. NDPO2S. Ta. NDPs09; Wisdom of the Desert. NDP29S;
ara Sabgal. Rich Like Us, NDP66S Zen Masters, NDPAIS
» Mirror for the Moon.t NDP46S.
omplete listing request free catalog from
Directions, 80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011 vie