The action is continuous—the fourteen numbers 1 are sung through in a single act which lasts about fifty minutes in Western Opera Theater’s 1971 recording—but one can make out a clearly structured progression, an arc through the life of Villon’s world to its end. (These notes, except for arias 9 and 10, are based primarily on the performance edition of the Pound/Antheil score prepared by Robert Hughes, and on the 1971 recording—see item 11 in Appendix B.)
Hommage ou ouverture, a six-note melody ‘based on a fundamental tone of D2 (five ledger lines below the bass clef)’ (CPMEP 35 n. 99), to be performed on a five-foot long alpenhorn;
Et mourut Paris and Je plains (Villon), and Mort, j’appelle (Ythier), sung by Yves Tinayre, tenor, accompanied by Olga Rudge, violin;
Motif’ a solo riff by Pound on kettle-drum;
Faulse beauté (Gallant) and Heaulmière sung by Tinayre, accompanied by violin and harpsichord;
Motifs de la foule [= ‘Père Noé’], sung by Tinayre and Robert Maitland, bass-baritone, with a mix-up (‘mélange’) of violin, harpsichord and trombones;
Si J’ayme et sers (Bozo) sung by Maitland to the accompaniment of two trombones;
Frères humains performed by the ensemble.
Because Harding worked in the Experimental Features section of the Drama Department and not in the BBC’s Music Department, Cavalcanti was developed as a music drama for radio. Pound called it ‘a sung dramedy in 3 acts’. ‘Dramedy’ was a word not to be found in the Oxford English Dictionary, but Pound had used it in 1920 when (as ‘T.J.V.’) he reviewed a rubbishy play full of sentimental gush, stagey banalities ‘and a parody of every cliché’ of the daily newspaper serials. He took the ‘tempest of applause’ it received to mean ‘the last fading and hesperal flicker of British intelligence’, or else ‘a lifelong and ineradicable devotion to Miss Eva Moore’. The play left him sympathizing, he wrote, with ‘the babu who said there were three sorts of plays: Comedy, tragedy and dramedy’. That might tell us something about the ‘dramedy’ element in his Cavalcanti.
The scenario is set up at the start of each act by the Announcer, and there is also some spoken dialogue within the acts. The plot is thin, almost non-existent; ‘but wother hell can you do with super-in-human refinemengts of the intellect’, Pound exclaimed to Agnes Bedford when pointing out that ‘the axshun’ of the second act was all to do with establishing the difficulty of ‘Donna mi prega’. That action consists of: Guido among his rowdy friends and deep in a game of chess; as a practical joke his page nails him by his shirt-tail to the bench; his friends with much laughter prevail on him to sing his philosophical canzone while they have him thus nailed down, though they then interrupt from time to time to declare they don’t understand it. The only point of the larky ‘action’ is to set the Canzone off against the friends’ incomprehension and their relative lack of seriousness.
There is more ado in the first act, and all to the same point. With some companions Betto, a bore, follows Guido into a cemetery where he is brooding upon his fatal love, and tries to compel him to be a guest at their dining club; Guido escapes by vaulting over a tomb and quipping that he would not fit in since Betto and his lot are in their proper element there among the dead. The incident is from Boccaccio’s Decameron, and it is related there to illustrate Guido’s isolated superiority. The build-up to the quip tells how his propensity to philosophical speculation set him apart from what his fellow Florentines regarded as the good life and made him decline membership of their clubs. Betto has to spell out to his friends that Guido meant ‘that plain unlettered dunces like us are no better than dead men compared with men of learning like him’. In Pound’s scenario Guido is next threatened by a gang of his enemies, and this time he escapes over the wall, kicking as he goes a huge flower pot off the wall and over their leader’s head. This is slapstick stuff, having nothing to do with what Guido sings, and that must be its point. He is the only serious character here, and he is surrounded by friends and enemies who are all fixed in the bathos and nonsense of low comedy. Between his realm of love and their unenlightened world there just is no interesting connection.
The real action of the opera is in Guido’s songs and in Fortuna’s finale. 2 The Overture, establishing a serious mood in which a rising melody is countered by darkly reflective cadences, leads into Guido’s singing of how he is pained unto death in love’s pleasing flame; and yet, in his folly, thinks himself saved because a mistress passed through his heart and carried all hope away. One must adjust (as in Erasmus’ Praise of Folly) to a riddling point of view which inverts conventional expectation and resolves the contradictions of pleasure and pain in love by renouncing, not love itself, but what was hoped for from the mistress. Betto the bore, thinking to flatter Guido, sings him one of his conventional ballate in which the lover pleads for his mistress’ mercy. For his pains Betto is told that the song is ‘de - ri - va - tive!…Showing the influence of earlier and inferior authors’. Seriousness is restored with Guido’s ‘Era in pensier’, ‘Being in thought of love’, which picks up the theme of his opening song. He meets two maidens in a wood and one sings, teasingly, ‘There rains in us love’s play’. Guido takes them to figure refining love, and confesses his condition: his heart has slain him with a wound it took from a lady in Toulouse. The maids understand that the lady so looked in through his eyes that by Love’s power she cut her image on his heart, and that Love now resides there and looks out from his eyes with a splendour their eyes cannot sustain. Since you suffer so grievously, they tell him, recommend yourself unto Love. He can only confirm their diagnosis, saying that all he can remember is Toulouse, a lady with corded bodice, slender, whom Love called Mandetta, and that he took his death wound from the sudden lightning of her eyes. This is the statement of Guido’s predicament, and the opera’s real starting point. The sight of Mandetta has put an end to his ordinary life: what will he do now?
He begins Act 2 with a resolution to keep faith with love though love show him no mercy, to serve though unrewarded; and in this spirit (which is Love’s gift) he finds that when pleasure pains, ‘There rains within my heart | such good sweet love | that I declare, “Lady, I am all yours”’. His friends then sing ‘In un boschetto’, ‘one of his lighter songs’ become popular in the streets, and they begin (according to Pound’s direction) ‘with a good deal of rowdyism’, though the words ‘gradually get the better of the horse-play’. The song celebrates another encounter in a wood, this time with a fair young shepherdess who is eager for a lover, and the singer thinks, ‘’twas but the time’s provision | To gather joy of this small shepherd maid’ as she draws him willingly to herself and gives him ‘sight of every coloured blossom’, to his unbounded joy. It is a charmingly innocent fantasy of the ‘classic’ kind, wholly without the complications of Guido’s way to ‘good sweet love’, and it serves to set the common or popular dream of love against his refined vision.
There follows Guido’s singing ‘Donna mi prega’, his philosophical Canzone, at considerable length. Pound saw this as the ‘tour de force and danger zone’ musically. He reported to Agnes Bedford that Tibor Serly ‘thought melody came up to same point too often’ and was ‘monotonous’; Bedford herself thought it ‘dull’. Pound’s defence was that the orchestration was ‘meagre’ because ‘this bit is mainly for radio’. But there is not much beauty and emotion in the singing to delight the ear; and the song seems to be going on not a little didactically about a meaning it insists only the already expert will understand.
However, as Pound remarked in The Spirit of Romance, in the Tuscan canzone thought was predominant, not emotion. It was devoted, he wrote, to ‘supernormal pleasures, enjoyable by man through the mind’; and its drama was ‘mankind’s struggle upward out of ignorance into the clear light of philosophy’. Guido, in Act 2, can be seen to be engaged in that struggle, as, nailed to the bench by his jesting and uncomprehending companions, he sings out his passionate apprehension of the intellectual form of all-creating Light. And he does reach, for that moment, ‘into the clear light of philosophy’.
Guido’s Canzone is immediately followed by a song of Sordello’s in the Provençal mode which he had brought into Tuscany, and the contrast is telling. Pound has Guido remark that Sordello’s song has a simplicity—and, one might well put in, a simple musicality—which his own Canzone lacked. ‘Tos temps serai’ expresses a sentiment close to that of Guido’s first song in Act 2: I will be ever constant in love (a soprano sings) because love causes me to serve the best and fairest of women, and it is to her honour that she does not advance me: her virtue is my reward. There is the difference that Sordello is in an interactive, mutual relation with his lady—her honour is vital to him, and also her holding him in honour; whereas in Guido’s song the vital relation is with an intellectualized Love. More significant than that discrimination, however, is the background to Sordello’s song. The point is made by the Announcer and again in the dialogue that Cunizza used to sing it. We need to know that she was also the inspiration of the song, having ‘formed [Sordello’s] genius’. Beyond that, she was for Dante and for Pound an icon of free and joyous loving. In his Cantos Pound records how her loving nature caused her to free her family’s serfs; and, in canto 36 following the ‘Donna mi prega’, he records how Sordello treasured her image in his mind above the five castles his king gave him. In complementary ways they exemplify love acting freely in their world, free of possessiveness, and free also of Guido’s intellectualizing. In a note, ‘Background—Florence at the end of the 13th century’, Pound remarked that ‘Sordello’s felicity and clearness [in his poetry] may well have been the despair of the men who 50 years after him tried to write philosophical verse’. That must set Cavalcanti’s ‘Donna mi prega’ in an equivocal light.
The second act ends with Guido’s being served with a decree of exile, signed by his friend Dante, ‘for the tranquillity of the city’; and in Act 3 he dies in exile. Cavalcanti was, as a matter of historical record, exiled, along with the leading members of both warring factions, the Bianchi and the Neri, upon the orders of Dante acting as one of the Priors at the time; and he was brought down with malaria in ‘the swamp at Sarzana’. He did not die there, however, since Dante had him brought back to Florence when he learnt of his fever. Pound has him die in exile for operatic effect.
The third act opens with another song of Sordello’s, sung this time (according to the Announcer) by ‘one of the stragglers of the French army’. ‘What use are eyes | that see not my desire’ is the refrain; while the two verses sing of dying from love. Guido, as if taking his lead from that, expands on the theme in his ‘death song’, ‘Quando di morte’, the twelfth ballata in which, as Pound had observed, ‘Guido turns to an intellectual sympathy…yet with some inexplicable lack—his sophistication prevents the complete enthusiasm.’ Then follows, as the culmination of the serious action of the opera, ‘Perch’io non spero’, ‘Because no hope is left me, Ballatetta, | Of return to Tuscany’. In this Guido accepts his death, and in a final and absolute commitment sends his soul, that is, his new person fashioned from desire, in care of the Ballatetta itself, to dwell with and adore the Lady he has served. But who is that Lady? If it were Mandetta of Toulouse then we might think that the opera was allowing him to reintegrate as he dies, if only in his own mind, what had been separated out in the middle act, the direct vision of beauty and the intellectual conception of it. However, the emphasis on the ‘sweet intelligence’ of the Lady would rather indicate that his desire is to dwell with Love as he had defined it in his ‘Canzone d’amore’. His paradise would be that of the Arab philosophers, a state in which the individual mind, refined into a rational soul, contemplates the universal intelligence and is at one with the light which has brought it into being.
In performance this mystery is complicated by Pound’s having Guido’s page (a boy soprano) sing the song with innocent clarity, though helped out (and thus interrupted) here and there by Guido’s mature baritone; and it is further complicated by his having Guido say that the boy must learn the song because there is a cypher hidden in the music and he won’t be let back into Tuscany unless he has mastered it. Margaret Fisher, with a fine combination of musical expertise and code-breaking ingenuity, locates the cypher ‘in the motif at bars 81–83’, that being ‘the first instance in which the opera’s motif resolves to its tonic note at the cadence’. She reads it off (by transposing the notes into the conventional pitch-names) as ut ut re mi fa sol fa mi re ut; then, by taking those syllables as Latin (ut), Provençal (re mi[r]), and the rest Italian, she finds so that to gaze intently gives me light, makes me king so. Well, as Fisher writes, ‘an opera director must have some toe-hold on the cipher’ since ‘the show must go on’, and hers is the only decryption on offer, and it does yield a credible gist of Guido’s poems. But it would be a mistake, I think, and a distraction, to make too much of it, as by seeking in it some secret revelation or message. The cypher is not the song, and Guido’s testament and mystery is surely in the song. The cypher is simply a password to get the page and the song into Tuscany, where the boy is to sing it and so pass on the tradition. He has still failed to master it, however, when Guido dies on the final note; and since the music is not written down we gather that the tradition stemming from Eleusis will have died with Guido.
The goddess Fortuna then takes over in the opera’s finale, appearing as dea ex machina to declare that she is the Lady who rules mankind and its affairs. Entering into Guido’s jailer she declares this in his voice and (according to Pound’s notes) with his heavy and relentless energy; then she sings it again as herself, ‘immortal…inhuman, impersonal…so powerful as to be unconscious of opposition’. ‘Destiny’, Pound noted, ‘not volition’. Machiavelli, whose song this may be, would consider, in the penultimate chapter of The Prince, ‘How far human affairs are governed by fortune, and how fortune can be opposed’; and he would conclude that ‘fortune shows her power where there is no force to hold her in check’. In Dante’s world-view fortune was subject to the control of Providence; but Providence is excluded from Pound’s Cavalcanti as from Machiavelli’s counsels. In their modern world it is the force of human will, of volition, that should oppose Fortune’s power. And where that force is lacking, as in Guido’s failure to make the intelligence of love prevail in his world, things are left to unenlightened chance.
Social Creditors are the last people who ought to be obsessed by nomenclatures, and they should either be in the front rank of fighters for clearer terminology or be led out to the ducking stool.
Meaning that we must understand what other people want (no matter what they call it) and that we must be and stay aware of what is going on.
What Huey Long says and means today, Roosevelt says and does not mean in a year or two. I said in the New English Weekly that Frank D. cd. side step any third party by a feint to the left just before the next Presidential election. He has been pushed to make that feint already.
The American highbrow etc. has underestimated our friend from Louisiana.
Huey has not stressed the use of flow. He has not, I think seen the full power that lies in the constitutional right of congress to issue money.
I can’t condense the summary of Jefferson’s economic beliefs (printed after p. 112 in My ‘Jefferson and/or Mussolini’, published in England, but not yet through the american barrage and sabotage.
But, I accuse all the Social Credit papers of not having given enough publicity to Huey Long’s more vital formulations.
Huey is no more befogged than 90% of the new economists. You still read even social credit essays which do not distinguish between property and capital.
I don’t think Huey dissociates wealth and purchasing power. I mean in his own mind.
Nevertheless when Huey demands
‘homestead allowance free of debt’,
he is demanding something which we ought to recognize as a national dividend.
when he demands not only free school books, but a guarantee that every child shall be assured of as much education as it wants or can stand, he is demanding a material dividend, and it wd. be hidebound social creditism to insist that this be given in the form of 30 cents worth of paper money.
The education of the young is their best guarantee for maintaining a clean economic system after they get it.
Huey’s whole emphasis on the rising generation is centuries ahead of Townsend’s plea for kindness to the decrepit (humane and charitable etc. as that may be.)
Give a man health and knowledge in youth and you will save very considerably on his needs for an old age pension.
Any man who means to be alive in 1936 and 1937 must pick his rulers not by where they are now, but by what they want and where they are going.
Long wants a new economic system. The root is in volition; in the direction of the will.
No man has lost more by Senator Cutting’s death, than his friend from Louisiana. The possibility of a third party for 1936 or 1940 (never wholly alluring) went out of American politics when Cutting plunged to his death.
But Social Credit in America will make the greatest of possible mistakes if it fails to study the Senator from Louisiana and if it fails to aid the Senator from Louisiana.
Share the wealth as Long sees it is still uncut marble, but from that heavy block to
share the purchasing power!
is a possible step. Share the purchasing power, the effective orders against the total production of the nation, as that production works, and as orders can and of a right should be issued against it, is the logical conclusion of what long wants. And Long wants it as no other man now in the Senate.
Long’s resurrection of the Pilgrim’s covenant is the finest appeal to our tradition that has come from any man now in politics. He did not get that out of millionaires’ newspapers.
If you get your ideas of Huey from the British or New York papers (run by mostly the same set of cooks) [stet. not crooks but cooks in this context—EP] you will not get the real Huey.
His style is better than Roosevelt’s. (Look up Schopenhauer on style if you want to see why I say this). His style is better than the Astor–Moley ballyhoo, and le style c’est l’homme.
The neo=Concord school and the neo=transpontine Georgians might start analyzing public writings in our time./ Long’s prose is, in spots, extremely clear and incisive. It is not filled with the Astor=Moley=Roosevelt evasiveness./ No reader is going to believe this until he or she spends a half hour with the actual texts or Long’s ‘Share the Wealth Principles’ or with the radio speech of March 7th.
Both these represent a progress from Father Coughlin’s 16 or whatever points.
There are still statements in these formulations that are more human than purely (videlicet, sterilizedly and unfructably) economic. Thank God for it! The one European who gets action has denied the incarnation of the homo economicus.
Long’s ‘please let me ask you who read this document’, is a request that we social creditors of all people ought to grant him.
We will get nothing from the Tugwell=Moley=Astor=Baruch melange of abuleia and dalliance.
There is no man in our public life more free of mental conceit (love of his own fixations, enamourment with fixed ideas, and wounds to vanity imminent in the modification of the details of those ideas,) than is Long.
Huey with an adequate cabinet would give us a factive administration. The term ‘adequate cabinet’ is very probably a dream floating in the clouds above American possibility. But there already exists a nucleus, or a scattered nebula, of men in the U.S.A. who know enough about economics (non=static but living and developing economic perception) to supply Senator Long with the details and carburetters requisite to putting his will into practice.
If we do notwork with Huey Long we risk a sixteen years’ delay in the establishment of a credit account for the nation.
You do not work with a man if you merely hang round and say ‘Yasssir!’
EZRA POUND
Hath benefit of interest on all
the moneys which it, the bank, creates out of nothing. (46/233)
Pound’s source was Christopher Hollis, The Two Nations: A Financial Study of English History (George Routledge and Sons, 1935), pp. 30 and 36. Hollis’s ch. 3, a useful summary account of the founding of the Bank of England, accurately reflects what was written in the early tracts mentioned below. Doubt has been cast on Hollis’s accuracy, and on the authenticity and the truth of the quotation, by Meghnad Desai, formerly a professor of economics at the London School of Economics, a leading member of the British Labour Party, and a life peer in the House of Lords. In his The Route of All Evil: The Political Economy of Ezra Pound (Faber & Faber, 2006) he wrote that he had been unable to trace the quote, allowed that it might have been made in a prospectus soliciting support, but dismissed its substance as ‘a common fallacy as to how banks operate’, one feverishly imagined by ‘anti-banking agitators’ and put about by ‘the conspiratorially minded’ (68).
I have not found the quotation in question in Bank of England: Selected Tracts 1694–1804: A Collection of Seven Rare Works…in the Goldsmiths’ Library of Economic Literature, the University of London (Gregg International Publishers Limited, n.d.), but there is indirect confirmation of it in the earliest of these tracts. William III being in need of money to finance his war with France, it was proposed that instead of borrowing at excessive rates from the goldsmiths, the government should borrow £1,200,000 from a new private Corporation to be known as the Bank of England. This Bank would raise the money by public subscription and lend it to the King at 8 per cent plus £4,000 p.a. for expenses (Hollis, 29). In A Brief Account of the Intended Bank of England (1694), attributed to Michael Godfrey or William Paterson, there is this:
This Bank will consist in a Revenue or Income of Eight per Cent. per Annum, for and upon the Money subscribed; and what Profits and Improvements can be made from the Business and Credit of the Bank, will be also divided among the Proprietors. Thus this Company or Corporation will exceed all others of that kind known in the Commercial World. For here will be Eight per Cent. per Annum certain upon the Capital; and as good and great a probability of other Profits as ever any Company had. (Selected Tracts 10)
The further profits, note, will be profits on its credit, not on its deposited subscriptions. In the second tract, A Short Account of the Bank of England (1695), attributed to Michael Godfrey, its deputy governor, we find first,
The Subscriptions to the Bank were made by vertue of a Commission under the great Seal of England, grounded upon the said Act of Parliament…towards the raising of the said 1200000 l.…And notwithstanding all the Endeavours of its Adversaries, to the great Astonishment as well of the Friends, as of the Enemies of the Bank, the whole 1200000 l. was Subscribed in 10 days time (1).
The tract then sets out to defend the Bank against its critics, and among its many justifications, including the 8 per cent return, there is one paragraph which reveals exactly how the Bank had benefit of interest on money which it created out of nothing:
Some find fault with the Bank, because they have not taken in the whole 1200000 l. which was Subscribed; for they have called in but for 720000 l. which is more than they have now occasion for: But however, they have paid into the Exchequer the whole 1200000 l. before the time appointed by the Act of Parliament; and the less Money they have taken in to do it with, so much the more they have served the Publick: For the rest is left to circulate in Trade, to be lent on Land, or otherwise to be disposed of for the Nations Service; and its better for the Bank, as well as the Publick, to have 480000 l. in the Subscribers hands, ready to be called for as they want it, than to have it lie useless by them. (6)
Could Pope or Swift in their satires have been so bold? (Note the hidden bonus: the Bank would receive 8 per cent on the full £1.2m, i.e. £96,000; but £96,000 on £720,000 meant an effective interest rate of 13.33 per cent.)
A 1705 tract, Remarks upon the Bank of England…Concerning the Intended Prolongation of the Bank, attributed to John Broughton, observed that among the Bank’s many privileges were that its interest from the government was ‘Exempt from Taxes, to which other Money, and Stock, and Land were liable’; and that its power to extend its credit without limit, ‘and upon so good a Foundation as the security of an Act of Parliament, is perhaps a more considerable Article of [its] Profit than even so great an Interest’ (13). To put it simply, the private Bank of England was authorized to lend and to charge interest on money it didn’t have—in other words, to print money; its liabilities were underwritten by the government; and its profits were all its own. The Bank of England continued as a private bank until its shareholders were bought out by the state after the 1939–45 war.
When Lord Desai declares Pound altogether wrong to think ‘that banks [in general] create profits out of nothing’, because ‘Banks have to…have collateral assets against any credit they create by lending’ (68), he is being disingenuous, since banks do lend on their credit. Witness Will Hutton in the Observer of 4 November 2007: ‘prudence demands that [banks] have up to 8 dollars or pounds of their own capital to support every 100 dollars or pounds that they lend.’ That order of ‘prudence’ ensured that ‘Between 2004 and 2007 bank lending rose 200 per cent while bank capital went up only 20 per cent’ (Will Hutton, Observer (13 April 2008)). In 2007 Citigroup’s ratio of assets to capital proved to be 1:48, though they reported ‘only’ 1:22 (Jeff Madrick, ‘The Wall Street Leviathan’, NYR (28 April 2011) 72). ‘In the past 10-to-one leverage would have been about par for a bank. More recently…many large financial institutions, including now-defunct investment banks such as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, reached for 30-to-one leverage, sometimes even more’ (Robert M. Solon, Nobel Prize in Economics 1987, NYR 56.8 (14 May 2009) 4). Imprudent Bear Stearns, America’s fifth largest investment bank, had collapsed early in 2008 with $11.8bn of capital ‘leveraged’ up to $395bn of debt, thus bringing on the great global credit crisis. In short, ‘Banks [do] create money by lending’ (J. K. Galbraith, Guardian (21 September 2012) 34. In fact, ‘The essence of the contemporary monetary system is creation of money, out of nothing, by private banks’ (Martin Wolf, Financial Times (9 November 2010)). Rather than being wrong, Pound, in 1935, hadn’t seen anything yet. ‘The bank makes it ex nihil’—not the whole £1,200,000 or whatever, but 40 per cent of it in the beginning, and a greater proportion now—and Pound might well repeat, ‘Denied by five thousand professors’ (46/233).
| Semi-private inducement |
| Said Mr RothSchild, hell knows which Roth-schild |
| 1861, ’64 or there sometime, ‘Very few people |
| ‘will understand this. Those who do will be occupied |
| ‘getting profits. The general public will probably not |
| ‘see it’s against their interest.’ (46/233) |
The authenticity of this quotation has also been called into question, and this time for good reason. Pound’s immediate source, as Leon Surette argued in his Pound in Purgatory: From Economic Radicalism to Anti-Semitism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), pp. 268–9, may have been appendix 5, ‘Quotations from Prominent Men’, in Father Coughlin’s Money! Questions and Answers (1936); though it should be noted that Pound himself, in A Visiting Card (1942), gave his source as Willis A. Overholser, A Short Review and Analysis of the History of Money in the United States (Libertyville, Ill.: Progress Publishing Concern, 1936), p. 46. He said there that the quoted words—a close paraphrase, not an exact quotation—were from ‘a letter of Rothschild Bros. [of London], quoting John Sherman [chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance], and addressed to the Wall Street firm of Ikleheimer, Morton, and Van der Gould, dated 25 June 1863’ (S Pr 280, 281—see also 309). This is the letter as printed by Overholser:
A Mr. John Sherman has written to us from a town in Ohio, U. S. A., as to the profits that may be made in the National Banking business under a recent act of your Congress, a copy of which accompanied his letter. Apparently this act has been drawn upon the plan formulated here last summer by the British Bankers’ Association and by that Association recommended to our American friends as one that if enacted into law, would prove highly profitable to the banking fraternity throughout the world.
Mr. Sherman declares that there has never before been such an opportunity for capitalists to accumulate money, as that presented by this act and that the old plan, of State Banks is so unpopular, that the new scheme will, by mere contrast, be most favourably regarded, notwithstanding the fact that it gives the National Banks an almost absolute control of the National finances. “The few who can understand the system”, he says, “will either be so interested in its profits, or so dependent on its favors, that there will be no opposition from that class, while on the other hand, the great body of the people, mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantages that capital derives from the system, will bear its burdens without complaint, and perhaps without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests.”
Please advise us fully as to this matter, and also, state whether or not you will be of assistance to us, if we conclude to establish a National Bank in the City of New York. If you are acquainted with Mr. Sherman (he appears to have introduced the National Banking act) we will be glad to know something of him. If we avail ourselves of the information he furnished, we will of course make due compensation.
Awaiting your reply, we are, etc.
Overholser also printed the response of Ikleheimer, Morton, and Van der Gould, as of 5 July 1863. In this Sherman is given the character of a hero of the age, as possessing ‘in a marked degree, the distinguishing characteristics of the successful modern financier’, and likely to ‘prove to be the best friend the monied interests of the world have ever had in America’. Enclosed with the letter was a printed circular, prepared because ‘Inquiries by European capitalists, concerning this matter, have been so numerous’, setting out ‘the method of organizing national banks under the recent act of congress, and…the profits that may reasonably be expected from such an investment’. The main points of the circular were these (Overholser 47–8):
Thus far the circular—which is not, as some have assumed, the notorious ‘Hazard Circular’ of 1862—is quite accurate ‘as to the method of organizing national banks under the recent act of congress, and as to the profits that may reasonably be expected from such an investment’. But then there is a clause 17 which mentions ‘the suit of Mr Branch against the United States, reported in the 12th volume of the U.S. Court of Claims Reports, at p. 287’, but that was a case originating in events dating from June 1865, and finally decided only in December 1876, long after July 1863, the supposed date of the letter enclosing the circular. The circular therefore cannot be what it purports to be.
Neither Overholser nor Coughlin gives any source for the circular and the related correspondence, and no authenticating source is known. Further, there appears to be no record to attest the existence of the Wall Street firm of Ikleheimer, Morton, and Van der Gould. One can only conclude, in the absence of any positive evidence to the contrary, that the exchange of letters and the circular were fictions, forged by a person or persons unknown at a date unknown. The fictions are true to the main facts, but they are not what they pretend to be. The remark attributed to one of the Rothschilds, therefore, while it may have its general truth, must be deemed to have been altogether falsely attributed.
1 The libretto, in the original Old French, consists of extracts, principally ballades, taken from Villon’s Le Testament, composed in 1462, plus the concluding Ballade des pendus composed in 1463 while Villon was under sentence to be hanged and strangled for his part in a brawl. (Sentence annulled on appeal, but Villon banned from Paris for ten years as a bad character—‘eu regard à la mauvaise vie dudit Villon’.) Most of the extracts were noticed in the chapter on Villon in SR. Inserted among the poems by Villon is a hymn to the Virgin by the thirteenth-century trouvère Williaume li Viniers, a setting of which had been included as ‘Mère au Sauveour’, with Pound’s English adaptation of the words, in Walter Rummel’s Hesternae Rosae (1912). There are fourteen numbers as Hughes and Fisher now count them: Villon’s ‘Item, m’amour’ (three lines) is no longer counted as a separate number. The hymn ‘Vergine pucele roiauz’ is now restored to its original and correct position, following ‘Dame du ciel’, and assigned as Pound intended to a voice within the church. It is followed by the Priest’s singing just four to six bars of ‘Suivez beauté’. (See EPRO 121 and 262 n. 116; CPMEP vii; Testament II 213–65.)
2 The libretto consists of 13 numbers, with an overture drawn from Sonate Ghuidonis.