In Milton there is very little action, properly speaking,* very little quick action, and the thought is all theological, that is to say, peculiar to a certain kind of metaphysics which does not concern the universality of mankind.
The fact is that the epic poem is a Greco-Roman survival, or very nearly so.
Only prose, which disengages the aesthetic sense and lets it rest, can carry the attention willingly over great spaces of print. Pickwick Papers is bigger, in point of words, than Paradise Lost; it is certainly inferior, as values go; but I have read Pickwick Papers more times than I can reckon, and I have read Paradise Lost only one time and a half, for I failed at the second reading. God overwhelmed me with bad metaphysics and I was literally God-damned.
from Charles Dickens—Pickwick Papers
Mr. Pickwick belongs to the sacred figures of the world’s history. Do not, please, claim that he never existed; the same thing happens to most of the world’s sacred figures, and they have been living presences to a vast number of consoled wretches. So, if a mystic can claim a personal acquaintance and clear vision of the Christ, a human man can claim personal acquaintance and a clear vision of Mr. Pickwick.
Pickwick, Sam Weller, Dick Swiveller—they have been personal acquaintances of our happier hours, irremediably lost through some trick of losing that time does not measure and space does not include. They have lapsed from us in a diviner way than dying, and we keep their memory with us in a better manner than remembering. The human trammels of space and time do not bind them to us, they owe no allegiance to the logic of ages, nor to the laws of living, nor to the appearances of chance. The garden in us, where they live secluded, gathers in flowers of all the things that make mankind copious and pleasant to live with: the hour after dinner when we are all brothers, the winter morning when we all walk out together, the feast days when the riotous things of our imperfection—biologic truths, political realities, being sincere, striving to know, art for art’s sake—lie on the inexistent other side of the snow-covered hill.
To read Dickens is to obtain a mystic vision, but though he claims so often to be Christian, it has nothing to do with the Christian vision of the world. It is a recasting of the old pagan noise, the old Bacchic joy at the world being ours, though transiently, at the coexistence and fullness of men, at the meeting and sad parting of perennial mankind.
It is a human world, and so women are of no importance in it, as the old pagan criterion has it, and has it truly. The women of Dickens are cardboard and sawdust to pack his men to us on the voyage from the spaces of dream. The joy and zest of life does not include women, and the old Greeks, who created pederasty as an institution of social joy, knew this to the final end.
...
He raised caricature to a high art and made unreality a mode of reality. Mr. Pickwick has a more solid density than our acquaintances; he belongs more than the next-door neighbor and is a more living person than dozens, such as the Trinity [...].
...
Somewhere surely, when the waking hand shakes our shoulder or the Gods themselves thin back into a lie, Fate will permit a Paradise for those who have communed in Pickwick, even if not in Christ, and have believed in the two Wellers,* even if not in the three Persons. They will live secluded from the joy of Heaven and the ecclesiastic pangs of Hell, not forgetful of the one-eyed bagman,* disdaining not so much as the absent shirt behind Mr. Bob Sawyer’s dirty neckcloth.
The fate of joyous things is that they never live, of sad things that they pass also. But the things which live by the mere gesture of their creation—their Attic permanence...... A Bacchic permanence, a dynamic splendor of consciousness, a transubstantiation of normality.
from Concerning Oscar Wilde
Pessoa wrote close to twenty passages about Oscar Wilde, some in English and some in Portuguese, dating mostly from the 1910s and 1920s. One of the passages was titled “Defense of Oscar Wilde,” and another was the sketch for a preface to a projected volume of Wilde’s work in For-tuguese translation, but most of the remaining passages (including the four published here) were probably intended for an essay to be titled “Concerning Oscar Wilde”.
Pessoa was ambivalent toward Wilde, as he was toward another of his literary obsessions: Shakespeare. Though he deemed Wilde’s writing facile, he was fascinated by the man, and especially by the man in relationship to art. He admired Wilde’s defiantly aristocratic attitude and seems to have felt, or feared, affinities with the aesthete’s personal life. In or near 1917 Pessoa cast a horoscope for Wilde, accompanied by a chronological outline of his life: birth, education, travels, first book publication, marriage, “pederasty,” imprisonment, death. This is followed by a second, rather different set of astrological indications under the heading “My case.” In at least one circumstance, Pessoa’s “case” matched Wilde’s: both men died on November 30.
The central circumstance, of course, is that Oscar Wilde was not an artist. He was another thing: the thing called an “intellectual.” It is easy to have proof of the matter, however strange the assertion may seem.
There is not a doubt of the fact that Wilde’s great preoccupation was beauty, that he was, if anything, a slave to it rather than a mere lover of it. This beauty was especially of a decorative character; indeed, it can hardly be said to be of any character but a decorative one. Even that moral or intellectual beauty which he craves or admires bears a decorative character. (...) Thoughts, feelings, fancies—these are to him valuable only insofar as they can lend themselves to the decoration and upholstering of his inner life.
...
Now, the curious circumstance about his style is that it is itself, qua style, very little decorated. He has no fine phrases. Very seldom does he strike on a phrase which is aesthetically great, apart from being intellectually striking. He is full of striking phrases, of the kind of thing that inferior people call paradoxes and epigrams. But the “exquisite phrase” of the poets, the poetic phrase proper, is a thing in which his works are signally lacking. The sort of thing that Keats produces constantly, that Shelley constantly hits upon, that Shakespeare is master in—the “manner of saying” whereby a man stamps himself as poet and artist, and not merely as a spectator of art—this he lacks, and he lacks it to a degree which is both obvious and unevident. It is obvious because his purely intellectual phrasing is so happy and abundant that the contrasting absence of purely artistic phrasing is very marked, and it is unevident because the pure delight caused by that very succession of intellectual felicities has the power to seduce us into believing that we have been reading artistic phrasing.
He loves long descriptions of beautiful decorative things and has long pages [of such descriptions] in Dorian Gray, for instance (...). Yet he does not invoke those beautiful things by means of phrases that shall place them before our eyes in a living manner; he does but catalogue them with voluptuosity. He describes richly, but not artistically.
His use of the pure melody of words is singularly awkward and primitive. He loves the process but is ever infelicitous in it. He likes strange names of strange beautiful things and rich names of lands and cities, but they become as corpses in his hands. He cannot write “From silken Samarkand to cedared Lebanon.” This line of Keats, though no very astonishing performance, is still above the level of Wilde’s achievement.
...
For the explanation of this weakness of Wilde’s is in his very decorative standpoint. The love of decorative beauty generally engenders an incapacity to live the inner life of things, unless, like Keats, the poet has, equally with the love of the decorative, the love of the natural. It is nature and not decoration that educates in art. The best describer of a painting, in words—he that best can make with a painting une transposition d’art, rebuilding it into the higher life of words, so as to alter nothing of its beauty, rather re-creating it to greater splendor—this best describer is generally a man who began by looking at Nature with seeing eyes. If he had begun with pictures, he would never have been able* t
o describe a picture well. The case of Keats was this. By the study of nature we learn to observe; by that of art we merely learn to admire.
There must be something scientific and precise—precise in a hard and scientific manner—in the artistic vision, that it may be the artistic vision at all.
...
Of all the tawdry and futile adventurers in the arts, whose multiplied presence negatively distinguishes modern times, he is one of the greatest figures, for he is true to falsehood. His attitude is the one true one in an age when nothing is true; and it is the true one because consciously not true.
His pose is conscious, whereas all round him there are but unconscious* poses. He has therefore the advantage of consciousness. He is representative: he is conscious.
All modern art is immoral, because all modern art is indisciplined. Wilde is consciously immoral, so he has the intellectual advantage.
He interpreted by theory all that modern art is, and if his theories sometimes waver and shift, he is representative indeed, for all modern theories are a mixture and a medley, seeing that the modern mind is too passive to do strong things.
...
Our age is shallow in its profundity, half-hearted in its convictions ...... We are the contrary of the Elizabethans. They were deep even when shallow; we are shallow even when deep. Insufficient reasoning] power miscarries us of our ideas. Little tenacity of purpose soils our plans ......
It is a sad thing to say, but no type so symbolizes the modern man as the masturbator does. The incoherence, lack of purpose,* inconsequence, ...... the alternation of a sense of failure with furious impulses towards life....
Wilde was typical of this. He was a man who did not belong in his beliefs. If he were God he would have been an atheist......
He thought [of] his thoughts as clever, not as just. This is typical of the age’s mental weariness; it is masturbation’s pleasure. The joy of thinking clubs to forgetfulness all the purpose of thought.
He did not know what it was to be sincere. Can the reader conceive this?
He was a gesture, not a man.
[The Art of James Joyce]
The art of James Joyce, like that of Mallarmé, is art preoccupied with method, with how it’s made. Even the sensuality of Ulysses is a symptom of intermediation. It is hallucinatory delirium—the kind treated by psychiatrists—presented as an end in itself.
[The Art of Translation]
I do not know whether anyone has ever written a History of Translations. It should be a long but very interesting book. Like a History of Plagiarisms—another possible masterpiece which awaits an actual author—it would brim over with literary lessons. There is a reason why one thing should bring up the other: a translation is only a plagiarism in the author’s name. A History of Parodies would complete the series, for a translation is a serious parody in another language. The mental processes involved in parodying* well are the same as those involved in translating competently. In both cases there is an adaptation to the spirit of the author for a purpose which the author did not have. In one case the purpose is humor, where the author was serious; in the other case a certain* language, where the author wrote in another. Will anyone one day parody a humorous into a serious poem? It is uncertain. But there can be no doubt that many poems—even many great poems—would gain by being translated into the very language they were written in.
This brings up the problem as to whether it is art or the artist that matters, the individual or the product. If it be the final result that matters and that shall give delight, then we are justified in taking a famous poet’s all but perfect poem, and, in the light of the criticism of another age, making it perfect by excision, substitution, or addition. Wordsworth’s “Ode on Immortality” is a great poem, but it is far from being a perfect poem. It could be rehandled to advantage.
The only interest in translations is when they are difficult, that is to say, either from one language into a widely different one, or of a very complicated poem, though into a closely allied language. There is no fun in translating between, say, Spanish and Portuguese. Anyone who can read one language can automatically read the other, so there seems also to be no use in translating. But to translate Shakespeare into one of the Latin languages would be an exhilarating task. I doubt whether it can be done into French; it will be difficult to do into Italian or Spanish; Portuguese, being the most pliant and complex of the Romance languages, could possibly admit the translation.
FROM ESSAY ON POETRY
Written for the Edification and Instruction of Would-be Poets.
Professor Jones
Various handwritten and typed passages make up this exemplary piece of Swiftian satire, which Pessoa began writing as a teenager in South Africa. It shows him at his finest as an English prose stylist, in part because his ultraliterary English is here used to best advantage. As explained in the “General Introduction,” Pessoa’s contact with English during his childhood years in Durban was intense but atypical, being largely restricted to his classwork and his extensive readings. If from the Elizabethans and early Romantics his English acquired a slightly outdated syntax, the writings of Shakespeare, Carlyle, and Dickens also endowed it with a permanent underlay of irony and humor. It was, in fact, the perfect English for a professor of literature fond of speaking with his tongue in his cheek, and so it seems a pity that Professor Jones wrote only this “Essay on Poetry.”
The essay was originally attributed to a Professor Trochee and had a slightly different subtitle: “Written for the Edification of Would-be Verse Writers.” After he returned to Lisbon, Pessoa revised the long opening section and changed the subtitle. No author’s name appears on the newer, typed copy, but a note in the archives attributes the resubtitled essay to Professor Jones.
When I consider the abundance of young men and the superabundance of young women in the present century, when I survey the necessary and consequent profusion of reciprocal attachments, when I reflect upon the great number of poetical compositions emanating therefrom, when I bring my mind to bear upon the insanity and chaotic formation of these effusions, I am readily convinced that by writing an expository essay on the poetical art I shall be greatly contributing to the emolument of the public.
Having therefore carefully considered the best and most practical way in which to open so relevant a discussion, I have not unwisely concluded that a straightforward statement of the rules of poetry is the manner in which I must present the subject to the reader. I have thought it useless and inappropriate to refer myself too often to the ancient critics on the art, since modern critics are pleasanter to quote and have said all that was to be said on the matter, and a little more—which is their part where they are original. For putting aside the critics of old I have two very good reasons, of which the second is that, even if I did know anything about them, I should not like to thrust my scholarship on the reader. I begin then my exposition.
Firstly I think it proper to bring to the attention of the would-be poet a fact which is not usually considered and yet is deserving of consideration. I hope I shall escape universal ridicule if I assert that, at least theoretically, poetry should be susceptible of scansion. I wish it of course to be understood that I agree with Mr. A. B. in maintaining that strict scansion is not at all necessary for the success nor even for the merit of a poetical composition. And I trust I shall not be deemed exceedingly pedantic if I delve into the storehouse of Time to produce as an authority some of the works of a certain William Shakespeare, or Shakspere, who lived some centuries ago and enjoyed some reputation as a dramatist. This person used to take off, or to add on, one syllable or more in the lines of his numerous productions, and if it be at all allowable in this age of niceness to break the tenets of poetical good sense by imitating some obscure scribbler, I should dare to recommend to the beginner the enjoyment of this kind of poetic license. Not that I should advise him to add any syllables to his lines, but the subtraction of some is often convenient and desirable. I may as well point
out that if, by this very contrivance, the young poet, having taken away some syllables from his poem, proceed with this expedient and take all the remaining syllables out of it, although he might not thus attain to any degree of popularity, he nevertheless would exhibit an extraordinary amount of poetical common sense.
And I may as well here explain that my method for the formation of the rules which I am here expounding* is of the best. I observe and consider the writings of modern poets, and I advise the reader to do as they have done. Thus if I advise the young poet to care nothing in practice for scansion, it is because I have found this to be a rule and a condition in the poems of today. Nothing but the most careful consideration and the most honest clinging to a standard can be of use to a learner in the art. In all cases I may be relied upon to give the best method and the best rules.
I approach the subject of rhyme with a good deal of trepidation, lest by uttering any remarks which may seem too strictly orthodox, I shall harshly violate one of the most binding regulations of modern poesy. I am obliged to agree with Mr. C.D. when he says that rhyme should not be very evident in any poem, even though it may be called rhymed; and the numerous modern poets who exemplify this precept have my entire approbation. Poetry ought to encourage thought and call for examination; what is then greater than the delight of the close critic when, after a minute dissection of a composition, he perceives, first, that it is poetry and not prose, secondly, after long exertion, that it is rhymed and not blank?
The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa Page 25
