The New Freewoman, October 15 1913

This issue of The New Freewoman has the first rumblings of the transition to The Egoist: the first article, before this issue reserved for the editorial, is Ezra Pound's The Serious Artist.

I love it when authors reference their time--and Ezra Pound's concern with the modern usually means he'll feed my desire. He opens with: "It is curious that one should be asked to rewrite Sidney's 'Defense of Poesie" in the year of grace 1913." He uses the comparison with Sidney to set up his purpose, which is to examine the ethics of art. First he determines that art is necessary because ethics are based on the "nature of man" and "the arts give us a great percentage of the lasting an unassailable data regarding the nature of man, of immaterial man, of man considered as a thinking and sentient creature." Well and good, but this progresses to the evolutionary elitism so characteristic of the year of grace 1913: "From the arts... we learn that certain men are often more akin to certain especial animals than they are to other men of different composition." Ok.

EP goes on to explain that bad art comes when the artist lies, because it ends up spreading a contagion of misapplied knowledge of the nature of man and people end up confused. Expressed in the converse: "Purely and simply... good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise. You can be wholly precise in representing a vagueness."

How's this: "Now art never asks anybody to do anything, or to think anything, or to be anything. It exists as trees exist, you can admire, you can sit in the shade, you can pick bananas, you can cut firewood, you can do as you jolly well please."

Art provides data about how men (people?) are different. That's part one of the essay, anyway. Welcome to the front seat of TNF, EP.

Other notes:

Richard Aldington contributes a sort of nasty portrait of English women on a train. I wonder what H.D. makes of his hatred of Englishwomankind.

There's an article entitled "The Conversion of a Specialist" about a doctor who has moved to treat tuberculosis with "vegetables, cereals, and fruits without eggs, milk, cheese, or butter"

Ezra Pound responds to that weird Angel Club thing from last time (the people who were going to found their own country of superior people) by asking him to support artists once the new country is set up. I really wonder what he's make of the MFA.

Elsewhere in the letters-to-the-editor there's plenty of White Slave debunking, always double-edged and uncomfortable...

Ads include one for  EP's Canzoni.

All for now...