74
FRANK KERMODE
dependent of nature. But it depends always upon the body–
upon the power of the body not to express emotion but to ob–
jectify a pattern of sentience. Fuller with her long sticks, her
strange optical devices, her burying the human figure in masses
of silk, achieved impersonality at a stroke. Her world was
dis–
continuous from nature ; and this discontinuity Valery, speaking
of his Symbolist ancestry, described as "an almost inhuman
state." She withdrew from the work; if to do otherwise is human,
said Valery, "I must declare myself essentially inhuman."
This is the doctrine of impersonality in art with which T. E.
Hulme and T. S. Eliot among many others have made everybody
familiar. "The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a
continual extinction of personality.. . . The more perfect the
artist the more completely separate in him will be the man who
suffers and the mind which creates." Thomas Parkinson, com–
menting on Ortega y Gasset's "dehumanization," "a point can
be reached in which the human content has grown so thin that
it is negligible"- remarks acutely that the confused reception
accorded to Pound's
Pisan Cantos
was due to critical shock at
their identification of the sufferer and the creator. Pound, in
leaving off his "ironic covering," simply broke with a rule of
poetics that he himself had done much to enforce. Mr. Parkinson
is glad; he wants to let "the reek of humanity" back into poetry,
where he thinks it belongs, and he seems to regard the imper–
sonality doctrine as a lengthy but temporary deviation from some
true "romantic aesthetic." I am not sure that he is right, or how
far he misunderstands the human relevance of what the imper–
sonal artist attempts. Mrs. Langer would have an answer for
him; and in any case Pound does not show the way back to
reeking humanity. In Mr. Eliot, in Valery, we surely .are aware
of what Stevens called "the thing that is incessantly overlooked:
the artist, the presence of the determining personality," and this
presence is consistent with "impersonality."
However this may be, Fuller's progressive extinction of the
dancing body was a necessary component of her success as an
