THE ALEXANDRIAN MIND
77
Yes, it has; for expecting to find a small derelict polity, Ulysses
has only found a hole fit to die in.
3
The reader need not be told how utterly different this attitude is
from the one expressed in Tennyscn 's
Ulysses.
But it might be worth
pointing out that in "Alexandrian" poetry the dramatic character
(whether mythological or otherwise) becomes not only more dis–
abused and meaner but more complicated as well. Tennyson's Ulysses
still speaks regally, in his own voice; the hero of Cavafy's poem is ad–
monished, through the mouth of the poet, not to mind his eventual
return to the drab island which, after all, has served its purpose as
a jumping-off place. The fact that Cavafy's hero stands as fully for
himself as Tennyson's did for the earlier poet does not obliterate the
difference but, on the contrary, makes it all the more striking. For the
voice, half hectoring half cajoling, which in the later poem addresses
the hero's own conscience carries no suggestion of either triumph or
resignation : behind the accents of evening glow and tranquil re–
membrance we are made to sense, as everywhere in this poet's lines,
the murk of quiet desperation.
Cosmopolitanism
The literary cosmopolitanism of every Alexandrian age flows
directly from its peculiar attitude toward history. It wiII invariably
take one of two shapes which, on the face of it, seem quite dissimilar.
It will either move toward a cunn ing compounding of idioms (see
the breaking down of linguistic frontiers in the work of Joyce, Pound
and, to a lesser extent, Eliot ) and so result logically in some sort of
polyglot marquetry work; or else it will introduce the one supreme
language (the
koine)
into one 'barbarous' province after another.
Each process seems the inverse of the other, since the first uses the
borrowing, the second the colonizing strategy. Yet what underlies both
is a single conviction: the conviction that national and racial bound–
aries are futile or vicious ; that since the language of mankind is
ideally one, it must be made so in actual fact; and that, since the
histori cal process is too slow and unpredictable, it must be made so
by fi at. Of the two methods, that adopted by Rome and Greece seems
3 Since the Alexandrian has no home other than language, it does not
matter whether I thaka is read as the "rca l place" 8pd the places tour.hed by
Ulysses on his voyage as "phantasmagoria," or the othf"r way round.
