ART AND LITERATURE
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attending the first performance of Alfred Jarry's
Ubu Roi
in Paris with
Arthur Symons on December 10, 1896. He could have understood of it
only the little he knew of French and whatever Symons was able to whis–
per to him. But he divined enough of the play to see in it an image of a
turn of the historical gyre he was bound to dread:
The players are supposed to be dolls, toys, marionettes, and now they
are all hopping like wooden frogs, and I can see for myself that the
chief personage, who is some kind of King, carries for sceptre a brush
of the kind that we use to clean a closet. Feeling bound to support the
most spirited party, we have shouted for the play, but that night at the
Hotel Corneille I am very sad, for comedy, objectivity, has displayed
its growing power once more. I say: 'Mter Stephane Mallarme, after
Paul Verlaine, after Gustave Moreau, after Puvis de Chavannes, after
our own verse, after all our subtle colour and nervous rhythm, after
the faint mixed tints of Conder, what more is possible? Mter us the
Savage God.'
Years later, in 1936, when he was compiling the
Oxford Book
if
Modern
Verse
and writing an introduction to it, Yeats evidently felt that he could
set himself free of his apocalyptic obligation. He had made several attempts
to invoke the Savage God. Now, if only for a moment, he could indulge
himself in the pleasantry of recalling that "in 1900 everybody got down
off his stilts; henceforth nobody drank absinthe with his black coffee;
nobody went mad; nobody committed suicide; nobody joined the Catholic
church; or if they did I have forgotten." The nineties were over: the next
turn of the gyre would find its dire emblem in a barely imaginable rough
beast slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.
Igor Webb:
The next speaker is Karen Wilkin. She is an art critic and
curator and the author, most recently, of a monograph of Cezanne. The
title of her paper is "Modernism and Postmodernism in Art and
Archi tecture."
Karen Wilkin:
A hundred years ago, Paris was the place to be if you were
interested in art that broke traditions. The meticulous idealism of the
Academy was still taught, practiced, and displayed in the annual official
exhibitions. Beaux Arts elaborations of classical sources were still demand–
ed of architects, but just as the tendrils of Art Nouveau ornament had
begun to twine across the fac;:ades of Paris buildings, art that set itself in
opposition to academic pieties, that we would now call "modernist," was
becoming more visible. In 1895, for example, Paul Cezanne had his first
