The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa (33 page)

And by these considerations we arrive at the other element, the formal one, in the poetry of today.

The phenomenon called balance, or equilibrium, is [in] no way so finely represented, when we deal with life—which, being dynamic, not static, cannot be compared to a perfectly still body—than by the oscillation of a pendulum. It is the very essential thing in this oscillation, and the natural thing, that it should go as far in one direction as in the opposite one. The growth of sensibility, the increase of receptivity must therefore* be corrected, balanced, and unified by an increase in the faculties which constitute inhibition and self-control. A sensibility which circumstances both of time and of place compel to be so much richer than the Greek one must be reined in by a controlling intellect far stronger than the Greek one, which was very strong. The increased
pace of the courser that leads us to the Future must be balanced by a tighter hold on the reins that guide it. If we are dragged along, let us be self-dragged along.

The great sin of Christian civilization is that, while it has constantly increased the passive elements of the mind, it has concomitantly undermined the active ones—that our increased ability to feel and analyze has not been accompanied by an equally increased ability to think and synthesize. This is not growth, it is merely increase. It is not development, but decadence. All Christian civilization, when it emerged from being barbarian, jumped at once into being decadent. Simple natures are easiest corrupted.

The monstrous phenomenon called Shakespeare is typical of the intellectual results of Christian civilization. The man who is the greatest sensibility in the world was incapable of self-discipline and self-control, could not create an ordered whole. The greatest poet in the ancient world was also its greatest artist. The greatest poet in the modern world is one of its least artists.

...

The fundamental defects of the Christian attitude towards life can be seen in the greatest poet it has produced typical of itself. The plays and poems of Shakespeare are, from the pure artistic standpoint, the greatest failure that the world has ever looked on. Never have such elements been gathered in one mind as were found in the mind of Shakespeare. He had, in a degree never surpassed, the lyrical gift in all its modes (except one); he had, in a degree never surpassed, the intuition of character and the broad-hearted comprehension of humanity; he had, in a degree never surpassed, the arts of diction and of expression. But he lacked one thing: balance, sanity, discipline. The fact that he entered into states of mind as far apart as the abstract spirituality of Ariel and the coarse humanity of Falstaff did to some extent create a balance in his unbalance. But at bottom he is not sane nor balanced. Incapable of
constructing, of developing, of balancing one thing against another, he stands forth to us as the incarnate example of Christian deficiencies.

If he be compared with Milton, the deficiencies become glaring. Shakespeare’s lack of a sense of proportion, of a sense of unity, and of a sense of development and interaction are as extraordinary as the fact that they happen to a Christian poet is ordinary.*

Our civilization, so rich and so complex, has produced extraordinary lyrics, unparalleled in range, depth, and comprehension and subtlety. It has not produced any supreme achievement in constructive poetry and literature.

Blank verse, the one so called, is an extremely dull medium to write in. Only the subtlest rhythmical faculty can ward off flatness, and it cannot ward off flatness for a long time. Perfect poems can be written in blank verse, that is to say, poems which can be read with interest and attention, and will fulfill and satisfy; but they must be short—“Tithonus,” or “Ulysses” or “Oenone”* and the like. When not short, or not sufficiently short, they can hold themselves up only by strong interest, and it is very difficult, except in drama, to carry strong interest along the desert of blank verses. Blank verse is the ideal medium for an unreadable epic poem. All the metrical science of Milton, and it was very great, cannot make of
Paradise Lost
anything but a dull poem. It is dull, and we must not lie to our souls by denying it. (...)

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.

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.

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* to 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 ......