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[1] SP 254-259 |
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The term Paideuma has been resurrected in our time because of a néed. 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-alI the thought and action of its own time. Frobenius has left the term with majo~.rmplications 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 . if those 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, historic or musical, one demands a sane 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 enlarging machine, thus cutting the costs of adequate photographic documentation from that of 8 by 10 inch or 6 b 4 lates, 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 (t~e Greek) contents from the Loeb library. Given an acquaintance with the language, even a 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 the two cultures. 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. I am 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 dassics , 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. It is my firm belief that no study of Greek authors offers a fully satisfactory alternative to reading of Tacitus, Catullus, Ovid, Proper- tius. And also that a great deal of specific study of history and econo- mics suffers from sheer ignoránce of Latin predecessorsinthosespecific fields. Looking eastward even my own scant knowledge of ideogram has been enough to teach me that a few hours' work on it is 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 curricülum 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 novo 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. `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 cuiture. 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. I mean there was no French writer with critical apparatus and a general awareness both of land of origin and country whereto, 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 expositirni far 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 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. 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 Marchands 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 terminology. The ranting, be it about Spain, Russia, FrSnce or economy, shows utter failure to dissociate:
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 cure it 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 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 mütual 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 oId 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 onr sorrow been `wished on us' by wool-headed forebears, orthe general lack of mental discipline in high civic places, cannot be dismissed as exotic. |
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[1] The Criterion, January 1938. |