BOOKS
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of the Cantos begin with myth or lyric and then "trail off into a
piece of contemporary satire, or a flat narrative." Mr. Tate does not
say so, but he appears to prove that the
Cantos
are an example of
"American humor" as defined by Constance Rourke. Pound's admirers
abroad tend to regard him as unique among his uniformly materialistic
and philistine countrymen. Yet any American must see in him something
strikingly native and "humorous." He is that perennial yokel who goes
to the big Eastern city or to Europe and beats the inhabitants at their
own game, or takes them in with his shrewd arguments.
There is certainly something humorous about the success of
Pound among his followers. In the present collection of essays-by old
hands like Eliot, Tate, Edith Sitwell, and Wyndham Lewis, and by
several young followers of Pound, mostly English-we have, for example,
the solemn treatises of Messrs. Swabey and Wykes-Joyce (a couple of
British pots cracked by an American crank) on Pound's vision of a
regenerated banking system. And we have Mr. Peter Russell's Introduc–
tion with its statement that the
Cantos
constitute an "epic new in
literary history" because their "main theme is the power of money as a
historical determinant"-which is a most stimulating idea for all those
who believe that the main theme of the
Iliad
is vegetarianism and that
Vergil's purpose was to preach against vivisection.
Pound belongs irresistibly to that great company of provincial
American "intellectuals" of which Charles Augustus Lindbergh, let us
say, is one of the best-known examples. Fundamentally the type is a
primitive "liberal" and "naturalist." He believes the good society
oould
be
achieved, if it were not for the Forces of Evil, by factual
practicality, the skill of craftsmanship, and avoidance of "abstraction"
and the supernatural.
If
he is not actually a professor or a preacher, he
would like to be. For he wishes to bring to our attention not only his
native skill, whatever it may
be,
but his insights into what is wrong
with the world. He wishes to alert us against certain furtive malignant
powers--the bankers, Wall Street, the Jews, the British, or the Catholics.
More than likely he will regard the regeneration of society as a problem
in sanitation. When the excremental has been banished, all will be well.
He will easily abandon
his
naturalism and liberalism and believe
in
magic
or surrender himself to the blandishments of a political dictator.
Ignorant of all that is profound, dramatic, and awful in human destiny, a
stranger to the sensibility of pathos and sadness, he is natively juvenile
and gross in every refined or spiritual exercise of the mind.
Theoretically there is no reason why such a man should not become
a fine
poet
and philosopher. The eager young Englishmen who now
