THAT VISIT TO Stone Cottage was significant in other ways for both Yeats and Pound. James Longenbach argues that while they were there Yeats and Pound mutually reinforced their ideas about an elite and aristocratic art, indifferent to the public, to which Pound now referred regularly as the vulgo or the canaille. Pound would take on Yeats’ causes, echoing him in ever more extravagant terms. Yeats’ troubles at the Abbey had already led him to wonder if there would ever be an appreciative audience for art in Ireland, but during 1913 he had been much exercised by another Dublin dispute, which had plunged him into further despair at what he saw as the city’s blindness to artistic value. Sir Hugh Lane, Lady Gregory’s nephew, had offered to give his collection of Impressionist paintings to the city, if they would be willing to provide an adequate gallery. Such a gallery, however, would be expensive and the Council hesitated. Conditions in Dublin were the worst of any capital in Europe: poverty was rife; the inhabitants of the insanitary Dublin tenements were often half-fed. There were strikes and agitation, and in the background fears about the progress of Home Rule. Ulster was determined to resist its implementation, and a militia of Ulster Volunteers had been formed under the leadership of Sir Edward Carson, famous as the barrister who secured Oscar Wilde’s conviction; in the south, in response, Nationalist Volunteers were banding together; civil war was threatening. The money needed to refurbish a large building as an art gallery seemed prohibitive in the economic and political circumstances.
Yet there were others who felt strongly that such a collection would add greatly to the cultural prestige of the new state if and when it came, and the Abbey Theatre, led by Yeats, ardently supported the project, contributing some of the profits from its recent American tour to the cause. Several wealthy figures subscribed, though one of those who considered giving money, Lord Ardilaun, said he would subscribe only if it could be shown that the public wanted the gallery. Yeats was outraged that anyone could think of taking the views of ‘the blind and ignorant town’, as he put it in one poem, into consideration. Now that the Home Rule for which he had hoped so long appeared imminent, Yeats was beginning to fear that the narrow Catholic philistinism that had greeted Synge’s plays was going to be the keynote of the new Ireland, and that a materialist and mercenary country with no feeling for the arts would emerge. ‘The intellectual workers in Ireland,’ he had said the previous summer, ‘see gathering against them all the bigotries – the bigotries of Dublin that have succeeded in keeping “the Golden Treasury” out of the schools, the bigotries of Belfast that have turned Nietzsche out of the public libraries. If Hugh Lane is defeated, hundreds of young men and women all over the country will be discouraged … Ireland will for many years become a little huckstering nation, groping for halfpence in a greasy till.’123 He wrote a series of poems on the issue, one of the best known of which, ‘September 1913’, springs straight from that speech:
What need you, being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till
And add the halfpence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone;
For men were born to pray and save:
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.124
Yeats must have felt his dismissal of the difficult position in which the city found itself needed some justification, for in a note to these poems he said he could have respected the argument about the poverty and the slums, but it was the philistine insults hurled at those who supported the idea of the gallery that horrified him. When Pound later commented on this incident, however, that side of the argument vanished: it became purely an issue of the public’s appalling lack of taste. Pound would write in 1915 that ‘any new development or even any change in any art has to be pushed down the public throat with a ramrod. The public has always squealed’: when ‘Sir Hugh Lane tried to give Dublin a collection of pictures, Degas, Corot and Manet, … they called him a charlatan and cried out for real pictures “like the lovely paintings which we see reproduced in our city art shops”.’125 The fate of the Dublin poor had entirely disappeared from view.
The Lane controversy, R. F. Foster suggests, led Yeats to believe that the only ‘bulwark against middle-class vulgarity’ could come from what he described as ‘a few educated men & the remnants of an old traditional culture among the poor’.126 Yeats was moving towards a belief that the aristocrat – literal or spiritual – and the peasant were equally under threat from ‘the filthy modern tide’, to which they were both far superior. It was a view that received a painful shock that month, when an extract from George Moore’s final volume of his autobiography Hail and Farewell appeared in the English Review; among other gibes at Yeats’ and Lady Gregory’s expense, Moore affected to be perplexed by Yeats’ dislike of the middle classes, since, he said, Yeats was middle class himself. Yeats was stung to the quick; the effect was not to reconcile him to the vulgar middle classes, but to set him out, on the one hand, on a quest over the next few years to establish his family’s aristocratic links, and, on the other, to make it clear that terms like ‘aristocratic’ and ‘bourgeois’ did not have merely class implications. He said nothing about Moore’s insults publicly, but Pound obligingly reproduced Yeats’ views in the Egoist in pieces purporting to be written by Bastien von Helmholtz, which drew attention to the calumny directed at Yeats by ‘One of the boudoir school of journalists’. The journalist, he complains, has misunderstood the meaning of the word bourgeois, which ‘is not applied to the middle classes to distinguish them from the aristocracy … The bourgeoisie is a state of mind. It is as a term of opprobrium, used by the bohemian, or the artist in contempt of the citizen … our journalist … has mistaken a term which is the censure of a whole code of morals and of ethics for a term of social snobbery’.127 In another piece, supposedly on John Synge, who gets little mention, he argues for the celebration of ‘great figures’ in defiance of the ‘cult of mediocrity’. ‘There is no truce,’ he writes, ‘between art and the vulgo’, although he also asserts, unusually for him, that ‘there is a constant and irrefutable alliance between art and the oppressed … The oppressed have never set a hand against their artists but the half taught have always done so.’128 The socially disadvantaged very rarely appear in Pound’s thought: it must have been some conversation with Yeats about the downtrodden Irish peasantry that brought this on, but while the oppressed appear to have vanished rapidly from his thought, by April Pound would be arguing strongly that artists were the aristocracy of the future.
It may be because Yeats’ mind was running on these things that he suggested a visit to an old friend of Lady Gregory’s, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, who entirely shared his views on the mercenary bourgeoisie of the modern world. Blunt lived not far from Stone Cottage, at his country house, Newbuildings, in Sussex, owned by his aristocratic forebears for generations, where he now bred Arab horses and maintained a pride of peacocks. Blunt was married to the granddaughter of Lord Byron, on whom he modelled his energetic life as a poet, womaniser, and supporter of liberation movements, those of Egypt and India being particularly close to his heart. Yeats had known Blunt for some time, as Blunt had also been a keen supporter of the Irish cause, and in 1888 had been sent to jail for two months for speaking in support of Home Rule. Blunt, now over seventy, had many years earlier had an affair with Lady Gregory – something which Yeats may not have known – but they had remained on the most cordial of terms. Blunt had had a play performed at the Abbey Theatre in 1907, with Florence Farr in the lead, and in 1911 Yeats attempted to get him elected to the Academic Committee, but he was no more successful in that than he was with Tagore.
Blunt, who had published a string of anti-imperialist books, was regarded as a subversive in government circles. He had no truck with any of the new movements in the arts – he has, after all, appeared earlier in this narrative in the context of his outrage at the Post-Impressionist Exhibition, and in connection with his affair with Lady Margaret Sackville, whose very traditional poetry he admired and promoted. Yet, like the young modernists, of whose work in aesthetic terms he disapproved so strongly, he rejected any belief in progress and in the superiority of modern civilisation. He refused to accept the contemporary racial hierarchy of the advanced white races, with non-white humankind descending through gradual steps to the lowly Hottentot, and instead held on to a feudal model, largely regardless of race, having a warm if condescending regard for the peasantry and an admiration for those he saw as the aristocracy in any culture; the new commercial middle classes at home or abroad were those that he could not abide. He wrote of a visit to Algeria that, for
all my love of the French … I found my sympathies in Algeria going out wholly to the Arabs … The contrast between their noble pastoral life on the one hand, with their camel herds and horses, a life of high tradition filled with the memory of heroic deeds, and on the other hand the ignoble squalor of the Frank settlers, with their wineshops and their swine, was one which could not escape us, or fail to rouse in us an angry sense of the incongruity which has made of these last the lords of the land and of those their servants.129
For Blunt, imposing Western modernity only brought degradation and misery. He had considerable admiration for Indian intellectuals and leaders, who he insisted were perfectly capable of self-government, and was shocked by the way the British in India lived their social lives completely segregated from the Indians, though he disturbingly puts forward the idea that relations have deteriorated since the civil service examinations made it possible for the middle classes to become colonial servants. Blunt’s admirable resistance to contemporary racial stereotypes was inextricably bound up with his reactionary class attitudes, but that did not in any way make him less attractive to Yeats and Pound.
Blunt appeared to Pound a deeply romantic figure, a Bertrans de Born type, both poet and activist, and he decided that not just a visit, but a tribute must be paid. Shortly before he and Yeats returned from Stone Cottage he set up a committee, to consist of himself, Yeats, Plarr, Sturge Moore, Masefield, Manning, Aldington and Flint, to give a dinner to honour the elderly Blunt. Quite what they were honouring him for even Blunt remained unsure. He had published a considerable amount of poetry, including translations of Arabic poems, but he was much less well known for his poems than for his denunciations of imperial policy, summed up in a pamphlet, The Shame of the Nineteenth Century, which he wrote in 1900, in which the ‘shame’ is the misery and suffering brought by Britain to so much of the world, to India, China, Africa, the ‘Pacific Isles’, the Maoris and the Australians (i.e. Aborigines).130 On the Chinese Boxer Rebellion of 1900, which started a Yellow Peril fever in Britain, he wrote in language which, if he read it, must have delighted Pound: ‘The Chinese, after a long course of bullying by the Powers, worrying by missionaries, and robbing by merchants and speculators, have risen, and are, very properly, knocking the foreign vermin on the head’.131 (Incidentally, he also pointed out that ‘in the commercial raids on China for the last sixty years it has been always Englishmen who have led the way, and who count now on securing the greater share of the commercial spoils’; the silk painting masterpieces which were ‘lost’ from the Imperial Palace in Beijing during the rebellion did indeed mysteriously turn up in the possession of the British Museum in 1903: Englishmen, in Blunt’s words, once again securing the spoils.)
A letter appeared in The Times announcing the committee’s forthcoming visit to honour him. Blunt had refused to go to a dinner in London, but invited the committee down to his Sussex ‘sixteenth-century defensible grange’ to lunch, the meal being retrospectively described as a ‘Peacock Dinner’, Blunt, at Lady Gregory’s suggestion, serving them a peacock in full feathers from the Newbuildings pride. Yeats had hired a motor car to drive over from Stone Cottage, a journey to which Pound had not looked forward; as he told Dorothy, ‘if it’s as dammmmM cold sunday next as it is now we’ll arrive like a box of marrons glacés’.132 Aldington and Flint came down together by train; Flint was in agonies before the event, convinced his suit would not pass muster, though it looks fine in the group photograph they took. Yeats made a speech saying the occasion was to honour Blunt as a poet, on the grounds that he was the first to use poetry to deal with contemporary issues, freeing it from Victorian abstractions. Only six of the committee of eight poets attended, Masefield’s wife, it was alleged, having refused to let him come; Manning too was absent, without explanation, but one might guess his deeply conservative guardian, Galton, had issued a similar veto to him. So the six remaining consisted of three imagists, Pound, Aldington and Flint, and three Rhymers, Yeats, Plarr and Sturge Moore; however, Pound stressed that the idea had not been to narrow the homage to these particular groups. The committee, he said, was ‘representative of the present vitality of English verse, although there were, among the younger men, unavoidable omissions, as follows: Mr D.H. Lawrence, who is in Italy; Mr Padraic Colum, now in Ireland; Mr James Joyce, in Austria; and Mr Rupert Brooke, somewhere in the South Pacific’.133 Blunt met them in the garb of an Arabian sheikh, but, though flattered by their attentions, he was unimpressed by their work. They presented him with a sculpture by Gaudier-Brzeska, which he described in his diary as ‘a small marble coffer with an inscription “Homage to W.S. Blunt”, and an absurd futurist bas-relief of a naked Egyptian woman the work of a Franco-Pole sculptor coming into fashion’.134 As soon as they had gone, he turned it face to the wall. Inside the coffer was ‘an address signed by the poets in a kind of futurist verse without rhyme or metre or much reason with bits of verse in the handwriting of each’.135
The very detailed account of the speeches Aldington reproduced in the Egoist – perhaps Flint helped him out with his excellent shorthand – quotes this ‘futurist’ address, which was a poem by Pound, not one of his best, celebrating Blunt’s espousal of individualism and his anti-commercialism, though unfortunately confusing the Egyptian nationalist, Arabi Pasha, whom Blunt had done much to support, with the well-known Italian patriot, Mazzini, and commending Blunt because he had ‘Swung the grand style, not made a trade of art … and detested institutions’.136 Of the ‘bits of verse’, samples of a poem by each of the others, Blunt somewhat cautiously said, ‘I very much appreciate the verses that you have written to me – if they are verses. I could not quite make out whether they were or not. I waited for a rhyme that did not seem to come.’137 Yet though he thought his visitors ‘queer looking young men with shock heads of hair’, they were, he decided, ‘capital fellows as it turned out, intelligent, and with a great knowledge of literature ancient and modern also some wit and as far as I could judge good hearts’.138
Blunt had published no poetry for some years. Later that year he was to bring out his collected poems, but it seems very unlikely this dinner was just about Blunt’s poetry. When Pound told Harriet Monroe she should publish some of Blunt’s poetry it was for ‘the glory of the name’ rather than anything to do with the poetry itself.139 When Pound wrote up the event in Poetry, although he quoted one poem, and said Blunt was the last to be ‘able to use the … “grand style” effectively’, perhaps more significantly he praised Blunt because he ‘had never ceased to protest against the tyrannies and swindles of the Empire’.140 For Pound, and in varying degrees for the others, it was the heady mix that Blunt represented that fascinated them: virile, poetic, anti-establishment, anti-Empire and aristocratic. British imperialists were seen in popular culture as the ideal of manliness: Pound wanted to create an alternative masculinity for the artist, and Blunt was an ideal model. Pound’s own critique of British imperialism was not particularly deep or systematic, but his experience with the British attitude to Tagore had left him highly indignant that stuffy public school civil servants could think themselves superior to fine artists, merely because they were British and the artists Indian. The full pleasure of the homage to Blunt came when they were told that a Foreign Office official had said he would never speak to any of them again. Pound would remember Blunt in the Cantos, associating him with action, nobility and culture:
But to have done, instead of not doing
this is not vanity
To have, with decency, knocked
That a Blunt should open
To have gathered from the air a live tradition
or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame
This is not vanity.141
Blunt remained a heroic and romantic figure to Pound, though to others, including his wife, he was a flawed figure, even if his recognition of the crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Empire was admirable. In Blunt’s account of the Indians, as in his attitude to Arabi, or to the Bedouin sheikhs, there is a powerful sense of his acceptance of them as equals, but it has to be admitted that westernised Jewish financiers were another matter. Like his friend and fellow anti-imperialist, Hilaire Belloc, who joined them at Newbuildings for tea, which in his case, according to Aldington, was a large glass of claret, he was something of an anti-Semite. Pound does, indeed, suggest that Blunt described the Empire as ‘a Semitic invention of Disraeli’s’; anti-Semitism was another way in which Pound would follow Blunt.142
Among the promising young writers who were unable to be present at the Blunt presentation, Pound had mentioned James Joyce, his first reference to him in print. Yeats had met Joyce on a couple of occasions, and thought he was doing new and promising work; since Joyce was having problems finding a publisher, he offered to help. He told Pound about the situation, ensuring that help would be provided by the ever energetic impresario. Pound first wrote to Joyce in general terms, saying that he knew of him through Yeats and offering to place some of his work in England, though warning him it was likely to be without pay. He could also recommend but not guarantee paid publication in the Smart Set (for short stories) or Poetry (for poems), which at two shillings a line got ‘most of the best people (and one hell of a lot of muck)’. At this stage Pound told Joyce that he didn’t ‘in the least know that I can be of any use to you – or you to me’, a revealing, though honest, comment in itself about Pound’s motives.143 Before Joyce could reply, Yeats had managed to locate his copy of Joyce’s Chamber Music, which Elkin Mathews had published in 1907, and suggested to Pound that he use the last poem in that collection for his new anthology. Pound wrote asking for permission to include it, saying he could pay a guinea immediately, and a share of the profits if there were any, an admirably democratic arrangement, but Pound did not mind sharing money; only power. Joyce agreed, also sending Pound some of the manuscript of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, as well as letters he had written to newspapers about the difficulties that he was having in getting Dubliners published; he had had two different contracts, the first six years ago, but both publishers in turn wanted to censor elements of the text, in the first instance on moral grounds, and in the second on political. Joyce had resisted, and the book remained unpublished. Pound immediately printed the story of Joyce’s trials over Dubliners in the 14 January issue of the Egoist, and wrote to Dora Marsden, sending her the first three chapters of Portrait of the Artist and asking if they could serialise it. To her credit, she agreed – it was sufficiently subversive and individualistic to fit the magazine – and the first instalment appeared in the February issue. Pound apologised ruefully for the lack of payment, but he pointed out that ‘Appearance in the Egoist may have a slight advertising value if you want to keep your name familiar’.144 That Grant Richards, the first of the publishers who had originally agreed to publish Dubliners, finally brought it out that June may have owed something to the Egoist’s venture.
Pound would be a loyal supporter of Joyce, and his appreciation of his first novel was very genuine. The tale of the young writer-to-be growing up in an unsympathetic and narrow environment from which he must escape to forge his art must have seemed like the story of his own life. Pound compared Joyce with Flaubert, a direct influence as it happened, but while he admired him as a social critic, a prose stylist, and a writer in whose work he found ‘a hardness and gauntness … clear statement, no shadow of comment, and behind it a sense of beauty that never relapses into ornament’, he never appears to be conscious of Joyce’s experiments with different styles of language in his first two novels, apparent even in the Portrait with the language moving gradually from that of the child to the mature artist; when Pound reviewed Ulysses all he commented on was Joyce’s use of dialect.145 Ford was to say, some years later, that because of his lack of interest in prose, Pound, when he did read a novel, was always preoccupied with ‘Subject rather than with rendering’.146 It was perhaps his lack of appreciation of the point of Joyce’s ‘rendering’ that led him later to be so baffled by the emerging Finnegans Wake and Joyce’s ‘blather about the revolution of the word’.147 Considering, however, how much more appreciative of Joyce he was than so many of his contemporaries, it may be unfair to blame him too much. Trying to get Joyce published would not be an easy business, however, and the inanity of the public and the publishing world would at times stoke his ire to incandescent fury, further hardening his contempt for the canaille.