The New Age, April 15, 1915

There's much to cover, and as usual, I'm a little behind. I've come to look forward to the end-of-the-month push to get all these posts out, even as it comes with its minor dread, too. Before dealing with the monthlies, though, I have to get the weekly out of the way. It is so hard not to fall behind The New Age. 

As usual, I'll start with Beatrice Hastings' "Impressions of Paris," as Alice Morning. This week's is a portrait of deep wartime depression: "I am in a horrid state of soul, right down in a rut of the war, and hanging head downwards--your perfect egoist... There's such a state as bleeding without fighting at all. The universe seems only just as far away as Paris is, and not more worth going out to behold" (653). Mixing modes, as usual, she tells a parable, an anecdote from French literary history, and stories of things she's seen and of her past. I've been thinking about how cool it would be to gather together the "Impressions of Paris" and The Egoist's "Passing Paris" and "Fighting Paris columns by Muriel Ciolkowska, perhaps as a book, or--what about an audiobook organized chronologically, and released through Librivox? Maybe someday.

Someone, probably Beatrice Hastings, is continuing the satirical columns of Anastasia Edwardes. I think it must be Hastings, because they are similar in tone to her "Impressions." In the last Edwardes column, she was a satire of the New Woman, a faux intellectual flirt. This week, the column is more about her husband, a middle-aged solicitor, who wants to go to the war and instead plays soldier very assiduously. It's slapstick-funny.

Ramiro de Maetzu writes an essay "On Art and Luxury," which goes something like this: people are worried that the war will kill off the arts because it will damage the patronage networks that art relies upon. This is incorrect, because art does not rely on patronage. This gives de Maetzu a space to critique Oscar Wilde and Theophile Gautier, who he considers to have made an error in advancing a doctrine of art for art's sake, which he sees as really being art for luxury's sake. In rating art so highly, they began to lose touch with reality: "In his essay, 'The Critic as Artist,' [Wilde] goes the length of declaring resolutely that, “'As civilisation progresses and we become more highly organised, the elect spirit of each age, the critical and cultured spirits, will grow less and less interested in actual life, and will seek to gain their impressions almost entirely from what art has touched.' Both in life and in art his ideal was marginal,--luxury" (641). The saving grace of this error was that Wilde and company thought that luxury implied craftsmanship, and this led them to perfect their art--even though in reality, luxury is based on scarcity of materials and the amount of labor they represent, not craftsmanship, per se:

"The object of luxury resembles the object of art in that both are expressions of power; but, while the object of luxury is only the expression of property or monopoly, the work of art tells us, through the power of the means of expression, that man is the master of Nature. Craftsmanship means power. In the object of luxury the thing to be shown is the power of the proprietor. In the work of art the essential thing is the power of the artist."

This ends with Romanitic declarations of art's power to connect humanity to the infinite, etc. De Maetzu has fused Romanticism with Marxism in an attack on art as luxury.

Quick Notes:

Arthur Thorn's short story/dialog, "Discovering Drama" includes a discussion of the reasons for the cinema's popularity vs. drama.

C.E. Bechofer quotes at length from Ivan Goncharov's Oblomov.

Rebecca West appears in "Current Cant"'s crosshairs for representing Germany as a poor country.

And lastly, as my United Auto Workers chapter prepares for a strike for a new contract, a note on wartime dock worker's strikes in England, discussed in The New Age and the correspondence pages. The upshot is that in a time when shipowners are purposefully hiding their merchant vessels in neutral ports to keep them safe from being commandeered and sunk, the country is instead angry at dock workers who refuse to be exploited. The high-level traitors go unnoticed, while the low-level protesters are pilloried.

The New Age, June 12, 1913

My favorite part of this issue was the unsigned list of instructions for writing modern poetry, which I can't resist copying here:

MODERN POETRY.

HINTS FOR THOSE WHO WOULD WRITE IT.

1. The theme should be as sordid and revolting as can be conjured up in the imagination of the writer.

2. Poetic expression need not be sought. Lines of poetry here and there may be lashed together by masses of commonplace language, Vulgar and slangy expressions. Realism will thus be “ attained.”

3. The writer should never miss an opportunity of inserting an oath or profanity, thereby avoiding a fatal insipidity; especially for the sake of rhyme or of botching up a halting metre. It is well to bear in mind that the writer need not hold himself responsible for the utterances of his creations.

4. The rules of metrical composition need not be observed. Whatever the metre chosen, the verses may lack or be in excess of the prescribed number of feet for such metre, according to the pleasure of the author. Any tag will do for a rhyme. Prepositions and conjunctions are now allowed to be quite perfect rhymes, and, for the sake of rhythm, the back of a sentence may be broken in whatever place the poet chooses.

5. In the old term “ poetic licence,” the significance of the latter word may be extended to include all phases of its meaning.

This issue has several frontal attacks on modern poetry--there's another attack on Yeats, with Pater and Wilde thrown in for special scrutiny.  Frost's "A Boy's Will" is called "idle rubbish" in the reviews section.  They even print a letter attacking their correspondent, Richard Aldington--accusing him of rudeness.  The New Age thrives on controversy, and it's always fun to find things like this. 

Is there any chance Eliot read the instructions for modern poetry and decided to attempt to follow all of them?  I'm being facetious, but I like reading The Waste Land through these rules.  I'll make a lesson out of it someday: it's good to emphasize that modernism emerged against massive resistance, and even sometimes-allies could be enemies.  This is close to Ann Ardis' thesis in Modernism and Cultural Conflict.  Which is more a note for me than for you.  Oh public notebook.