THE ALEXANDRIAN MIND
79
through the pressure of circumstance, to stoop to the "small thing
well done." The causes of failure are as various .as the failures them–
selves; they range from the Great Refusal to that momentary failure
of nerve which may decide a man's, or a nation's, entire career.
Here the Trojans provide the great historical paradigm, made doubly
poignant by the fact of their all-but-success. The poem called "Tro–
jans" is one of the finest in Cavafy's collection, and one of the most
straightforward in its identification, as the very outset, of the luckless
tribe with our own generation.
In our misfortunes our exertions are,
All our exertions, like those of the Trojans.
We do succeed a bit; and then a a bit
W e're ready to take on; and we begin
To have some confidence and some good hopes.
But something always turns up and stops us.
Achilles in the trench in front of us
Starts up and with loud shoutings fright ens us
It should be noted that moral considerations do at no point enter
the simple victor/ victim antinomy, whose terms are furnished ex–
clusively by temporary and, so far as the writer is concerned, arbitrary
power constellations.
5
The victim is
ipso fa cto
deserving of pity; the
victor of censure, if not of abhorrence.
The Curious Byways of History-Conuption
Just as he approves action only at the points where it passes into
inaction, so does the Alexandrian writer cherish only those passages of
history that are least "historical," i.e. momentous: the quiet hack–
waters skimmed by flies, where time seems to have stood still; the
countries, shadowy and perhaps a trifle shady, on the confines of
myth and fable. These too are failures of the actual which the poet
must turn-as he did his
rat es
and exiles-into triumphs of the imagi–
nation. The empathy of the Alexandrian is strictly proportional, it
would seem, to the pathos of his subject. This is true even of so
"wholesome" a writer, comparatively speaking, as Wallace Stevens; it
5 Yet there are sheepish suggestions, in Cavafy as in most Alexandrian
writers, tha t the victim is undone by his own sensibility rather than by the
insensibility of others.
