Lewis, Wyndham - The Tyro, 2
Lewis, Wyndham - The Tyro, 2
Lewis, Wyndham - The Tyro, 2
THE
TYRO
A REVIEW
OF THE ARTS
OF PAINTING
SCULPTURE
AND DESIGN
2/6
THE EGOIST PRESS
2 ROBERT ST:
ADELPHI.LONDON
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THE TYRO.
Edited by W Y N D H A M L E W I S .
PublishersThe Egoist Press, 2, Robert Street, Adelphi, London, W.C.
No. 2.
CONTENTS.
Editorial
EDITOR.
A Preamble for the usual public.
Recent Painting in London
The Finance Expert.
The Three Provincialities
T. S. E L I O T .
Abstract Painting and some Analogies
RAYMOND DREY.
Some Russian Artists
J. DISMORR.
Essay on the Objective of Plastic Art in our
time
WYNDHAM L E W I S .
1. Art subject to Law of Life.
2. Art and Games.
3. Standards in Art.
4. A Third Method between Subject and Object.
5. The Sense of the Future.
6. The Function of the Eye.
Bugs
Pieta (poem)
Southern Syncopated Singers (poem).
Grotesques Walking
A Note on Imagination
Tyronic DialoguesX. and F
Lettre de Paris
..
Bestre
S T E P H E N HUDSON.
JOHN RODKER.
...
JOHN ADAMS.
H E R B E R T READ.
WYNDHAM L E W I S .
W A L D E M A R GEORGE.
WYNDHAM L E W I S .
BRADLEY * SON. LTD.. PRINTERS * PUBLISHERS. LITTLE CROWN YARD, MILL LANE, READING.
COPYRIGHT U.S.A.
LIST
OF
REPRODUCTIONS O F
AND DESIGNS.
PICTURES
Dismorr.
i.Conversation
Lipschitz.
ii.Sculpture
iii,Room No. 59
Wyndham Lewis.
iv.Red and Black Olympus
v.Women
vi.Girl Reading
vii,Sensibility
viii,Drawing for Jonathan Swift ...
ix.Women descending from Bus
Dobson.
x.Family
xi.Cornish Arabesque
Etchells.
xii.Gunwalloe
xiii.Porthleven
xiv.Portland
Wadsworth.
xv.Port
xvi.Mudros
xvii. ,,
xviii. ,,
Animal Study
Cedric Morris,
EDITORIAL.
THE THREE
PROVINCIALITIES.
has been perceptible for several years that not one but three
IbyTAmericans,
English literatures exist: that written by Irishmen, that written
and that composed by the English themselves. Thirty
years ago Irish and English literature were in a state of partial
amalgamation. That is to say, the literary movement in England
was very largely sustained by Irishmen ; for some years, otherwise
on the whole rather barren years, the depleted English ranks were
filled by Irishmen. English literature lacked the vitality to assimilate
this foreign matter ; and, more recently, in accord with political
tendencies, Irish writers (mostly of minor importance) have reassembled in Dublin. There remain, as a permanent part of English
literature, some of the poetry of Yeats, and more doubtfully the
plays of Synge (probably too local for permanence). As for the
future, it may be predicted that the work of Mr. Joyce should arrest
the separate Irish current, for the reason that it is the first Irish
work since that of Swift to possess absolute European significance.
Mr. Joyce has used what is racial and national and transmuted it
into something of international value ; so that future Irish writers,
measured by the standard he has given, must choose either to pursue
the same ideal or to confess that they write solely for an Irish, not
for a European public. No more comic peasants, epic heroes,
banshees, little people, Deirdres ; Mr. Joyce has shown them up.
Mr. James Stephens (I think it was) in a recent number of the Outlook
advocated that Irish writers should return to the Irish language.
In that case, there will be no further need to discuss Irish literature
a t all.
American literature, in contrast to Irish, has not yet received
this death blow from a native hand. Owing to the fact that America
possesses a much greater number (even making full allowance for
the difference of population) of able second order writers than England,
its " national literature " is extremely flourishing. If it has produced
nothing of European importance it nevertheless counts a considerable
number of intelligent writers ; has several literary critics more alert
and openminded than any of their generation in this country ; and
some of its poets and novelists at least admire respectable ideals,
and tend towards the light. The advance of " American literature "
has been accelerated by the complete collapse of literary effort in
England. One may even say that the present situation here has
11
13
forms in the midst of which they move and have their being.
Appreciation of abstract design, whether this be organised consciously,
as in a painting, or at hazard, as in the panorama of the streets or
countryside, demands a degree of sensitiveness which is far from
being general. It is extremely difficult to form any opinion as to
the extent to which the average m a n is sensitive to design. Complete
immunity from its influence is probably rare, though most people
are ignorant of its physical and mental reactions because their faculties
of perception have become automatic through lack of conscious
exercise. Mean architecture m a y exert a depressing influence on
m a n y who have never asked themselves the question whether it is
mean or not. Most public monuments and thoroughfares must be
endemic centres of depression from which the individual only succeeds
in protecting himself b y virtue of a h a p p y propensity for passing
by without looking, or looking without deliberately registering an
impression.
Conscious susceptibility to chance arrangements of form and
outline being so rare, it is not surprising t h a t the deliberate contrivances of abstract art appear meaningless to m a n y who are by no
means insensitive to more complex kinds of art, and who, for this
very reason, are the less inclined to tolerate what they cannot understand. In a picture full of poetic allusion or of obvious reference to
common visual experience, the element of pure design is only too
readily overlooked or taken for granted as something of quite
subordinate importance. The artist is freely credited with a t t a c h ment to ideas which might be expressed otherwise t h a n pictorially ;
sensitiveness to interrelations of form and colour for their own sake
passes unrecognised, or is esteemed an insufficient motive either for
creation or appreciation.
It follows quite naturally t h a t a form of art which flouts t h e
general desire for information, comment, description, & c , becomes
an intellectual bugbear. Neither art (as A. has known art), nor
sense (as B. can perceive it), it is deemed a mockery, an exasperating
offence. Cubists and others have, it must be admitted, too often
made understanding unnecessarily difficult by labelling their inventions with inapposite titles, or at any rate with titles whose relevance
ceased with the inception of the design. It is irritating, and m a y be
misleading, to call an arbitrary arrangement of forms, bearing no
resemblance to recognisable objects, " Mandolines and Glasses " or
" A Portrait of Madame X . " The mandolines doubtless exist, and
15
so, indeed, may Madame X, but those who try to find them in the
picture look in vain, and because their natural curiosity is frustrated,
accuse the artist of making fun of them. It becomes difficult to
persuade such people of the complicity of the mandolines or the lady
in the picture at allthey are like the unnecessary allusions in a
conundrum, added, as the joker says, " to make it more difficult."
Yet if there be one obvious fact in abstract art, it is surely the discrepancy between the affirmations of ordinary vision and the entirely
novel structural reality conceived by the artist. This is the initial
challenge which the spectator is asked to accept; the artist's right
to complete freedom of design, or, to be more precise, of invention.
Fortunately for the artist, no manifestation of the spirit is ever
born in a vacuum. However original his artistic consciousness,
the artist is never completely isolated. Not everyone confronted
by an abstract painting asks, " What is it ? What does it
represent ? How do you explain it ? " There is, in truth, nothing
to explain except that it is an invention, a contrivance, an effort of
construction and arrangementin short, a new organism existing
and appealing in its own right. Explanation may clear away misconceptions as to the nature of abstract art, and thus place the
spectator in a position whence he may contemplate it directly without
suffering the impediment of extraneous ideas and preconceptions.
But more than this it cannot do. Those who are naturally impervious
to the music of form, and those others who misprize it unless combined
with a more complex form of appeal, are not to be won by explanation.
Why is it, then, that music, in nature the most conspicuously
abstract of the arts, presents no noticeable difficulties, in its simpler
forms at any rate, to the normal intelligence ? Or to put the question
in a form dispensing with any need of qualification, why is the abstract
nature of music universally accepted ? The analogy of music has
been adduced in nearly every attempt to justify the practice of
abstract painting, but it cannot be said to have convinced the hostile
or indifferent majority, in spite of the admitted fact that music is,
essentially, an arrangement of abstract sounds. The analogy would
be more persuasive were it not for the associations with ulterior
ideas which are found in nearly all popular music, as indeed they are
found in all popular paintings, and which are considered by so many
music lovers as the more significant part of the whole. To most
people music does not appeal solely, or even mainly, as an arrangement of abstract sounds. Its appeal is linked with literature, as in
16
18
Cedric Morris.
ESSAY ON T H E OBJECTIVE OF
PLASTIC ART IN OUR TIME
BY
WYNDHAM LEWIS.
It was not possible to include any more sections of this essay in the
present number of " The Tyro." Further sections will be printed in future
numbers. It is intended to publish the complete essay, amplified, as a book.
This success was taken over b y the school t h a t succeeded the impressionist, other elements were introduced, and again a new thing
was the result. This " newness " in both cases possessed the merit
of being w h a t the painter of t h e preceding school would have evolved
had he been given a double term of life. It did not mean the death
of a good thing, b u t its fecundation. The inexhaustible material
of life, as it comes along, suggests constantly a readjustment and
revision of w h a t is there when it arrives. The new thing in art,
is not better t h a n the thing t h a t preceded it, except a t t h e t u r n of the
tide in a period of great poorness and decadence, when a dissolution
and death is occurring. It may be better, though never better
t h a n the best already recorded or existing.
It m a y be worse.
But it is a growth out of its immediate predecessor, and is marching
in time, also, with t h e life with which it is environed. A form of it
becomes extinct, perhaps, in one race, and is t a k e n up in a n o t h e r .
The way in which science differs, a t first sight, from art, is
t h a t the progress of scientific knowledge seems a positive and
illimitable progression ; in the sense t h a t we know more to-day
about the phenomenon of electricity, for example, or of disease, or
the structure of the world, t h a n men are recorded ever to have
known. There is reason to believe t h a t we shall soon be still better
informed. In painting, on the other hand, a masterpiece of Sung
or of the best sculpture of Dynastic E g y p t is, as art, impossible
to improve on, and very little has been produced in our time t h a t
could bear comparison with it.
But a r t is a valuation : in its relation to science it is somewhat
in t h e position philosophy has so far occupied. Science presents
men with more and more perfected instruments, and t h e means
of material ascendency : these appliances are used, and t h e use
of t h e m reacts on t h e user, and on his estimate of t h e meaning
and possibilities of life. These estimates and beliefs are chalked
up, and more or less critically signalled, in t h e works of the artist,
and assessed sometimes b y the philosopher. So science, in a sense,
is criticised b y a r t a t the same time as is m a n .
The popular current belittlement of t h e function of what,
since Socrates, has been called philosophy, tends, as is always
t h e case, to become vindictive ; to thrust too harshly some hero
of t h e m o m e n t into t h e e m p t y throne. But no doubt philosophy
m u s t become something else to survive, though t h e character of
mind t h a t has m a d e a m a n u p to the present a philosopher will
23
" I hate books," " I hate pictures," or " I hate music," is a remark
not infrequently heard on the lips of people who formerly would
have derived some satisfaction from supporting the arts. They
have backed too many " duds " : they know that there is nothing
they can encourage or identify themselves with that will not involve
them almost in abuse, that will not be violently attacked. It will
be almost as though they had done the beastly thing themselves !
Such pictures, music or books as would not involve them in this,
are too stupid and clearly insignificant to waste time about. So,
desiring a quiet life, they right shy of the arts altogether.
And yet, because this produces a vacuum, which as true children
of nature they abhor, in their existence as social beings, and makes
their life shrink to a valueless and less excusable affair, all this
leaves them a little ashamed and worried. All science can give
them, and to it they repeatedly turn, in the shape of values, is
a scepticism of which they have enough and to spare, and accumulations of animal luxury, which they feel, in its naked effrontery,
should in some way be clothed with values, and the intellectual
disguises in which their selfishness has always formerly been wrapped.
This question of standard is forever the ultimate difficulty where
art is concerned. When the social life on which art depends becomes
especially diseased and directionless, it appears with more insistence
than ever, forced out of the contradictions beneath. This is because
the picture, statue or book is in effect a living and active thing,
evolving with other living things, and suffering their checks and
distresses.
You can have a perfect snowball: what you expect of it is
that it be made of snow and nothing but snow. That is all you
mean by " perfect " in this case. All snow is the same, and so you
get easily enough your perfect snowball.
But the book or the picture again not only is living but gives
an account of life. The work of art is produced by means of an
instrument not originally shaped for performing these literary
or other feats, and one that has to be employed concurrently at a
variety of blunting tasksit may be, even, making a living in a
bank, or livery stable. The mind, hybrid as it is, with no end and
no beginning, with no nice boundary at which it could be said :
" Up to this mark you can depend on a perfect result, and all that
arises you are competent to deal with " : from this mind nothing
can be awaited but such productions as may cause us to say : " That
29
When anyone says, however, a " realler " world, not only an
intenser and more compact statement of it than the usual working
of our senses provides, is meant, but also a different world.
For what the artist's public also has to be brought to do is
to see its world, and the people in it, as a stranger would. There
have been so far principally two methods of achieving this. One
is to display a strange world to the spectator, and yet one that has
so many analogies to his that, as he looks, startled into attention
by an impressive novelty, he sees his own reality through this veil,
as it were, momentarily in truer colours. The other method is the
less objective one of luring the spectator to the point from which,
inevitably, the world will appear as the artist sees it, and the spectator
from that point of vantage paints the picture for himself, but with
the artist's colours and his eyes. The first of these methods can
be described very roughly as the impersonal and objective method,
and the second the personal and subjective one. The latter method
(contrary to what is sometimes supposed) seems to be more assured
of a positive result: for a lesser effort of intelligence is required
on the part of the public. It is the method that usually characterizes
the art of an undeveloped society. The former, in which everyone
participates more fully, is proper to a " civilized " time. The
civilized man again is less willing or less able to abandon his personality sufficiently. He is (each member of the thronging audience)
a little artist himself. He will not be meddled with : he must be
addressed and moved, if at all, in the capacity of critic. He is not
adventurous enough to go far field. It is a case of the mountain
going away from Mahomet where Mahomet will not budge himself,
if it is desired that the mountain should not be so near to the
spectator.
The artist, unless of a very lucky or privileged description,
can only exist, even, by pretending to be one of the audience.
Nothing less democratic than that will be tolerated.
By this description of what we call a " civilized " public you
may gather that I am not very enthusiastic about it. In that
you will be right: but it is not because I contrast it nostalgically
with its opposite. A sort of undisciplined raw democracy of the
intellect is what " civilized " describes in our time. It is the revolt
of the not naturally very wise or sensitive against any intellectual
rule or order (parodying or marching in sympathy with political
revolution).
33
t h e y are nearly as silent as the Kinema. There the mind, by arranging things as it requires t h e m for its own delight or horror, can get
t h e full emotional shock, the purely visionary quality t h a t early
in life becomes dissociated from our exercise of the visual sense.
In w h a t does this " emotional " quality, the stripping of things
and people by the eye of their more significant and complete emotional
vesture, consist ? Simply in an incessant analysis of the objects
presented to us for the practical purposes of our lives. W e are
given by t h e eye too much : a surfeit of information and " hard fact,"
t h a t does not, taken literally, tally with our completer values for
t h e objects in question. To make up, from the picture presented
to us by the eye, a synthesis of a person or a thing, we m u s t modify
t h e order for which the eye is responsible, and eliminate much of the
physical chaos t h a t only serves to separate us from the imaginative
t r u t h we are seeking.
The eye, in itself, is a stupid organ, or shall we say a stolid one.
It is robust to a fault, where the ear is, if a n y thing, hypersensitive.
Everything received through the eye from the outside world has
to be " t r e a t e d " before it can be presented to t h e imagination
with a chance of moving it. The law of this " t r e a t m e n t " is, first,
a process of generalization.
An intense particularization may,
however, on the principle of extremes meeting, have the same effect.
But, broadly, it is by a generalizing of the subject-matter t h a t you
arrive at the rendering likely to be accepted by the imagination.
I a m using the word " imagination " to stand for t h a t function
of t h e mind t h a t assesses and enjoys the purely useful work performed
b y the other faculties ; the artist-principle in the mind, in short.
In traditional psychology the distinction between imagination
and memory is said to be t h a t with the former the sensations are
arbitrarily re-ordered ; whereas " memory " is the term we apply
to a fainter picture of something already experienced, b u t the
sensations occurring in the same order, in the order of nature.
Dreams are an example of sensations evolved, with great complexity,
in a new order, and with new emotional stresses and juxtapositions.
The work of the dramatist or novelist is in this category, and t h a t
of most painters whose work is remembered. But the work of
a r t does the re-ordering in the interests of t h e intellect as well as
of the emotions.
It is by studying the nature of this process of organization
in art, taking several concrete examples, t h a t I shall begin the search
for the laws t h a t govern this form of invention.
37
BUGS.
Y first term at St. Vincent's was the summer one. It was
M
simply awful being driven over by Mussell in the T-cart.
Old Bobby jog-trotted, plop, plop, down the curly drive between
nasty thick laurels and an iron railing. On the other side there was
a field where a lot of boys were playing cricket, but I didn't know it
was cricket till Mussell told me. Lucas took my box and told me
to go into a little room with a lot of photographs of boys on the
wall while he went on talking to Mussell and patting Bobby. I
didn't even see them drive away because, while I was standing at
the window, Mr. Beasley came in. He was so enormous I could
hardly see his face, and he had a long red beard ending in a point
in the middle of his chest and he put the tips of it into his mouth
while he asked me questions I couldn't answer. His trousers were
short and he wore low shoes that were nearly as long as his beard
and had very thick soles. He pulled the bell and told Lucas to take
me into the playing field.
A boy was standing close by and I went up to him and asked
him what his name was. He said, " What's yours ? " Afterwards he
told me his name was Ramsey and I asked him to be my friend.
He laughed and stood still for a while looking at the boys playing.
Then he walked across to another place and I walked with him and
tried to take hold of his hand, but he pulled it away. I didn't know
then we were part of the game and were fielding, and he called me a
little fool. I told him I thought he was going to be my best friend
but now I knew he was my bitterest enemy.
After the beginning of the term they put hurdles across part
of the field where it went into a square between high hedges and one
Saturday afternoon the boys helped to make hay. It was very hot
and Lucas unlocked the cupboard where he kept the boys' hampers
and we all bought bottles of lemonade. Paddy Houston and I made
a regular little hut, like Livingstone, out of the haycocks and after
we had drunk our bottles of lemonade we lay down in the lovely
smelling hay and I told him about when Papa and Mamma and I and
Soror went to Bonn, only I said Pater because the first day Lopez
kicked me for saying Papa. Paddy didn't believe about Soror
being black, he said nobody ever saw a black footman and he didn't
believe about the storks in the marshes at Bonn nor about the soldiers
marching back from France with green wreaths on the tops of their
38
40
GROTESQUES WALKING.
have you speech ? have you conversation ? she cried, have you t h e
power to convey ideas intelligibly ? oh how m y heart sank among
m y intestines knowing myself in her divine eyes a coxcomb a numskull
a solemn imbecile grotesquely falling into unconscious humour,
crestfallen I slunk back to m y old dry bones from which still I hope
one day to extract a philosophy adequate but no more t h a n adequate
to the agitated dust storm under which figure we realists grapple
with this alleged universe of so-called life.
Yet brothers when the call comes from Comic Muse or Tragic
" The grotesques are walking, the grotesques are walking ! " it m a y
come at any time in the day or night most inconvenient in the night
let them walk for m y p a r t no no pour out pour out make the street
and taste a steel-grey blue intellectual laughter because of t h a t
bizarre company of grotesques walking.
John Adams.
PIETA.
How strange t h a t the gay body
with groaning anguish
should so suddenly be clay.
How strangethe livers flaccid
and corpse coldoh and heavy.
How strange t h a t the mother
whose heart yearns, womb yearns, breast yearns . . .
forces tears from her own clay . . .
tears of water, tears of blood
in such pain . . .
and the astounded dust is puddled into clay
while she is fire of yearning, dust of longing.
How strange, the clay wells tears of water, gouts of blood
impatient to be dust,
and Mary with tears of anguish, gouts of yearning
compels him to be clay.
So she has his weight on her knee.
Mary from out her clay
has pressed the wells of yearning
and now is dust
a n d Christ is clay.
So still they do not meet
and still she has him not.
J o h n Rodker.
42
A NOTE ON
IMAGINATION.
46
X.Hush,
hush ! " Suspicious," you understand, is the word the world has found
to apply to those liable, through lack of self-control, to make a scandal. I t
is a word t h a t bears with it a n element of reproach. It is contrived by society
as a punishment. It is not so severe as the label " bore " (which is administered
for the crime of discussing things t h a t people are too lazy or stupid to b e
attracted by), b u t still one t h a t carries with it a social stigma.
F.How true t h a t is.
X.Yes, I thought you would think t h a t true.I expect you are often a bore !
But to return to your " suspiciousness." You are supposed to take it for
granted, you see, t h a t everyone does you any slight damage they can. If they
are competing with you in a closer sense t h a n the general social one, they will,
of course, damage you to the full extent of their ability. You are supposed,
naturally, to be engaged in similar activities on your side. There are a multit u d e of more or less intense cross-currents as well : others battering subterraneously at you, and at each other. Your blow m a y arrive a t t h e same
moment in the bosom of some opponent as another blow posted from a source
quite unknown to you, weeks before your own missive. He m a y stagger in
consequence more t h a n you expected. Under these circumstances, to suddenly
announce, as you have to me, t h a t someone is paying you undesirable attentions
of the usual malignant type is equivalent to hitting a m a n in the eye in a drawing
room, or assaulting a lady in public who would be delighted to accommodate
you in the usual way and less publicly.
You see now more or less what you are doing ? Every civilized milieu
is, and always has been, engaged perpetually in a sort of subconscious, subvisible lawyer's brawl. It is the devouring jungle driven underground, t h e
instinct of bloody combat restricted to forensic weapons.
It is a nightmare, staged in a menagerie. The psycho-analysts with thenjungle of the unconscious, and monsters tipsy with libido, have made a kind
of Barnum and Bailey for the educated. But people do not apply this sensational picture as they could do with advantage.
Our social life is so automatic t h a t the actors are often totally unaware
of their participation in the activities about which we are talking. The world
is in the strictest sense asleep, with rare intervals and spots of awareness.
It is almost the sleep of the insect or animal world. No one would in the least
mind, of course, being a tiger like Clemenceau. But what makes him or her
highly indignant is to be unmasked as a rat or a cat ! I t is as though you burst
in upon a fashionable Beauty too early in the day.
Everyone is outwardly and for the world a charming fellow or woman,
incapable of anything b u t the most generous and kind (always K I N D , this
is a key-word) behaviour. Everyone knows t h a t in reality everybody is a
shit, as much as he or she dare be. (And this " courage " involved again
endears the thoroughly dirty dog to his fellows. I t supplies the tincture of
romance.) The reticence and powers of hypocrisy of our English race enhance
this situation.
So, if you find yourself injured all of a suddenfind, t h a t is, a n unexpected
pin sticking into your hide obtruded from the eminently respectable obscurity ;
or a particularly vicious pinch administered ; examine t h e finger-print or
abrasion : retaliate a t t h e earliest opportunity. Twenty years hence, if you
cannot before. B u t never declare yourself as you h a v e declared yourself
47
to me. Such candour smacks of impotence. And, above all, it implies with
a boring directness, the Truth that you need be no sage to know. Every
kitchenmaid knows that all the people by whom she is surrounded are shits,
and if it is to their interest or if they can, they will let her down, injure or rob
her.
F.You exaggerate the viciousness
X.And am suspicious ! But I only exaggerate with you. I am never guilty
of exaggeration at any other time. You must not give me away 1
Scene : The same.
X.Ha, ha ! my dear F., I am " having some trouble " with Q.
F.Hush !
X.I know, but observe the way in which I deal with this matter. It will be a
nice little object lesson for you !
F.I am glad to find, all the same, that you are sufficiently human to have trouble
with our fellow-animals at all.
X. (sighing).It is as an animal that I resent " trouble." However, here is the
letter I have written to the cadaverous Q. :
Dear Q.Would you, as a proof of the friendship you profess, share
a secret of yours with me ?
(I may be asking the impossible, for you may not know your own
secret).
O puzzling Q., you have made great speeches ; you entertain with a
benevolent haste all those approaches by societies and particulars, the
entertaining of which would tend to make, as you see it, your importance
grow. When the X society's support, even, is in question, for Yorkshire,
Cambridge, or the South Pole, with an unblushing speed you interpose
yourself, and replying for others, speak as though, instead of being Q., as
you really are, you all the while were X.
Now what I have asked myself is (you will forgive me) if you are really
so young as to believe that such procedures are worth while ? Or if you
only pretend to be (compelled in some sense to throw out ballast by the
shallowness of the milieu), and if in reality you know that they are not.
That you are affecting to be living, in short, at a point of development that
you have some time past ?
Having asked my question, I will give you my answer first. I do not
believe that the above is the answer. I believe in reality that you are only
half conscious of what you do ; just as the forger or murderer in most cases
forges or murders as it were in his sleep. I believe in these little matters
you are an automaton ; and that the acts of the automaton have not the
full consent of your mind. That is why, my dear Q., I continue to frequent
you (only keeping an eye open, the while, for the slim, but rather harmlessly
Dickens-like, rascality that is in hiding : for you are really a Dickens' figure,
are you not ? a Boz ?) ; and why I remain (has it ever occurred to you how
this epistolary form implies " still am, in spite of everything ").
Your humble servant,
X.
F,But, my dear X., you must be mistaken about Q. He is a most sympathetic,
charming fellow.
X.You have taken our last conversation to heart!
48
LETTRE
DE
PARIS.
BESTRE.
and again how the blood clung to him, Bestre was in no way grasping.
It went so far that he was noticeably careless about money. This, in
France, could not be accounted for in any other way.
Bestre's quarrels turned up as regularly as work for a good
shoemaker. Antagonism after antagonism flushed forth : became
more acute through several weeks : detonated in the dumb pyrotechnic I have described : then wore itself out with its very exhausting
and exacting violence. At the passing of an enemy Bestre will
pull up his blind with a snap. There he is, with his insult stewing
lusciously in his yellow sweat. The eyes fix on the enemy, on his
weakest spot, and do their work. He has the anatomical instinct
of the hymenopter for his prey's most morbid spot; for an old wound ;
for a lurking vanity. He goes into the other's eye, seeks it, and
strikes. On a physical blemish he turns a scornful and careless
rain like a garden hose. If the deep vanity is on the wearer's back,
or in his walk or gaze, he sluices it with an abundance you would
not expect his small eyes to be capable of delivering. But the mise-enscene for his successes is always the same.
Bestre is discovered somewhere, behind a blind, in a doorway,
beside a rock, when least expected. He regards the material world
as so many ambushes for his body.
Then the key principle of his strategy is provocation. The
enemy must be exasperated to the point at which it is difficult for
him to keep his hands off his aggressor. The desire to administer
the blow is as painful as a blow received. That the blow should be
taken back into the enemy's own bosom, and that he should be
stifled by his own oaththat Bestre regards as so many blows, and
so much abuse, of his, Bestre's, although he has never so much as
taken his hands out of his pockets, or opened his mouth.
His immediate neighbours on the quay afford him a constant
war-food. I have seen him slipping out in the evening and depositing
refuse in front of his neighbour's house. I have seen a woman screeching at him in pidgin French from a window of the debit two doors
off, while he pared his nails a yard from his own front door. This
was to show his endurance. The subtle notoriety, too, of his person
is dear to him. But local functionaries and fishermen are not his
only fare. During summer, time hangs heavy with the visitor from
Paris. When the first great ennui comes upon him, he wanders
about desperately, and his eye in due course falls on Bestre. It
depends how busy Bestre is at the moment. But often enough
60
he will take on the visitor in his canine way. The visitor shivers,
opens his eyes, bristles at the quizzing pursuit of Bestre's oeillade:
the remainder of his holiday flies in a round of singular plots, passionate conversations and prodigious encounters with this born
broiler.
Now a well-known painter and his family, who rented a house
in the neighbourhood, were, it seemed, particularly responsive to
Bestre. I could not, at the bottom of it, find any cause for his
quarrel. The most insignificant pretext was absent. The pompous,
peppery Paris salon artist, and this Boulogne-bred innkeeper inhabited
the same village and grew larger and larger in each other's eyes at a
certain moment, in this bare Breton wild. As Bestre swelled and
swelled for the painter, he was seen to be the possessor of some insult
incarnate that was an intolerable element in so lonely a place. War
was inevitable. Bestre saw himself growing and growing, with the
glee of battle in his heart, and the flicker of budding effront in his
little eye. He did nothing to arrest this alarming aggrandisement.
Pretexts could have been found. But they were dispensed with
by mutual consent. This is how I reconstructed the obscure and
early phases of that history. What is certain is that there had
been much eye-play on the quay between Monsieur Riviere and
Monsieur Bestre. And the scene that I had taken part in was the
culmination of a rather humiliating phase in the annals of Bestre's
campaigns.
The distinguished painter's wife had contracted the habit of
passing Bestre's kitchen window of a morning when Mademoiselle
Marie was alone theregazing glassily in, but never looking at
Mademoiselle Marie. This had such a depressing effect on Bestre's
old sister, that it reduced her vitality considerably, and in the end
brought on diarrhoea. Why did Bestre permit the war to be brought
into his own camp with such impunity ? The only reason that I
could discover for this was that the attacks were of very irregular
timing, and that he had been out fishing in one or two cases when it
had occurred. But on the penultimate occasion Madame Riviere
had practically finished off the last surviving female of Bestre's
notable stock. As usual she had looked into the kitchen ; but this
time at Mademoiselle Marie, and in such a way as practically to
curl her up on the floor. Bestre's sister had none of her brother's
ferocity, and in every way departed considerably from his type,
except in a mild and sentimental imitation of his colouring. The
distinguished painter's wife on the other hand had a touch of Bestre
61
about her. It was because Bestre did not have it all his own way,
and recognized, probably with misgiving, the redoubtable and Bestrelike quality of his enemy, that he resorted to such extreme measures
as I suspect him of employing to rout her on the ground she had
chosenhis kitchen.
On that morning when I drifted into the picture what happened
to induce such a disarray in the female ? Bestre was lying in wait
for her. What means did he employ during the second or two that
she would take in passing his kitchen window, to bring her to her
knees ? In principle, as I have said, Bestre sacrificed the claims
any individual portion of his anatomy might have to independent
expressiveness to a tyrannical appropriation of all this varied battery
of bestial significance by his eye. Had he any theory, however,
that certain occasions warranted, or required, the auxiliary offices
of units of the otherwise subordinated mass ? Can the sex of his
assailant give us a clue ? I am convinced in my own mind that
another agent was called in on this occasion. I am certain that he
struck the death-blow with another engine than his eye. I believe
that the most savage and obnoxious means of affront were employed
to cope with the distinguished painter's wife.
Monsieur Riviere, with his painting-pack and campstool, came
along the quay shortly afterwards, going in the same direction as
his wife. Bestre was at his door ; and he came in later and let us
know how he had behaved.
" I wasn't such a fool as to insult him, there were witnesses :
let him do that. But if I come upon him in one of those lanes at
the back there, you know
I I was standing at my door ; he came
along and looked at my house and scanned my windows " (this is
equivalent in Bestre warfare to a bombardment). " A s he passed
I did not move. I thought to myself ' Hurry home, old fellow,
and ask Madame what she has seen during her little walk ! ' I
looked him in the white of the eyes : he thought I'd lower mine ; he
doesn't know me. And, after all, what is he, though he's got the
Riband of the Legion of Honour ? I don't carry my decorations
on my coat! I have mine marked on my body. Yes, I fought in
1870 ; did I ever show you what I've got here ? No ; I'm going to
show you." He had shown all this before, but my presence
encouraged a repetition of former successes. So while he was speaking
he jumped up, quickly undid his shirt, bared his chest and stomach,
and pointed to something beneath his arm. Then, rapidly rolling
62
i.
Conversation.
Dismorr.
ii.
Sculpture.
Lipschitz.
W y n d h a m Lewis.
W y n d h a m Lewis.
Women.
Wy n d h am Lewis.
Girl Reading.
vi.
W y n d h a m Lewis.
vii.
Sensibility.
W y n d h a m Lewis.
viii.
W v n d h a m Lewis.
ix.
Dobson.
x.
Family.
Dobson.
xi
Cornish Arabesque.
Etchells.
xii.
Gunwalloe.
Etchells.
xiii
Porthleven.
Etchells.
xiv
Portland.
Wadsworth.
<
xv
Port
Wadsworth.
xvi
Mudros.
Wadsworth.
Mudros.
Wadsworth.
xvii.
Mudros.
Wadsworth.
L'ESPRIT
NOUVEAU
SCIENCES,
(Ready 14th
LE NUMERO:
6 f r . LE NUMERO:
NEW
VOLUME of
entitled
"REAL
POEMS
PROPERTY,"
By
HAROLD
MONRO.
( Ready 14th
March).
ART
ANCIEN.
ART
MODERNE.
ARTS
APPLIQUES.
LOUIS
FRANCE:
VAUXCELLES.
L O N D O N . W.C.1.
DE
STIJL
5fr.
ETRANGER : 5 fr.
7 fr.
L'AMOUR de L'ART
ETRANGER
Directeur
March).
SOCIOLOGIE
S E L E C T I O N from
the
POEMS of CHARLES C O T T O N
Decorated by
C L A U D LOVAT FRASER.
T H E O . VAN
DOESBURG
50.
DE
FRANCE,
Haarlemmer Straat, 73 A,
PARIS (VP).
LEIDEN, HOLLAND.
NEW WORKS
BY
ARTHUR
MELEE
BLISS
FANTASQUE
ROUT
(Cover Design by C. LOVAT FRASER)
Full Score 8 / - net ; Piano Duet 6 / - net.
CONVERSATIONS
(Colyphon by EDWARD
WADSWORTH.)
THREE
ROMANTIC
SONGS