78
PARTISAN REVIEW
doubtless the more attractive, though it
is
hardly one that recommends
itself to contemporary practice. In any event, it is the method quite
naturally endorsed, and celebrated in poem after poem, by
Cav~fy.
Here language, while still vaunted as the grand repository of actions,
begins slyly to assert its claim to being itself the
supreme human
action/
and language of course stands for
Greek,
even as
Greek
stands for the collective consciousness (and conscience) of civilized
mankind. This consciousness is most frequently expounded through
the characters of scholars and pocts, less often through those of men
of affairs; yet since that distinction is, to the Alexandrian mind, but
one of degree (the shaper of word or stone being simply the shaper
of policies raised to the highest power) we should not make too
much of that bias: only enough to realize that to a writer like Cavafy
the kind of action which, on the traditional view, is the least "active,"
is also the one which affords the richest instruction and so deserves
closer attention than any other.
"The Unlucky Cause Has the Approval of Cato"
This leads us on to the next consideration: the tenderness of the
Alexandrian mind for every form of defeat. The gods may smile upon
the victor; not so the poet or historian of an era which has learned
to identify success with barbarism or, at the very best, with mal–
practices of one kind or another. The Alexandrian writer is driven
to look for areas on which he may expend his compassion; and since
the floor of history is strewn with victims, he will never lack for sub–
jects. Cavafy manages to crowd his pages with every conceivable
variety of failure: able executives pining away in some dreary prov–
ince; poets
manques
or killed by dissipat.ion; young, charming,
ef–
fete rulers of puppet states; artists destined for great things yet forced,
4 There are interesting connections between Cavafy's attitude toward lan–
guage and Mallarme's Byzantinism and "byzantine" language cult, which I hope
to develop elsewhere.- It might be observed at this point that every Alexandrian
age shows the same divorce between the primitive "doers" of deeds and those
who study or appreciate them. The procrss is one of graduated removals and
takes different forms according to the stratum of society in which it occurs.
T ake the situation of the contemporary "middlebrows." Some learn about Augus–
tus through a biography, others through a review of that biography, others yet
through a title they chance upon in a second-hand book catalogue. These last,
though obviously at the farthest remove from the original event, are also the
most "refincd" appreciators of Augustus: his name stands for everything he
h as done and so makes any knowledge of his character and career redundant.
