Modern American Poetry

Mauberley 65

And Kung raised his cane against Yuan Jang,

Yuan Jang being his elder,

For Yuan Jang sat by the roadside pretending to

be receiving wisdom.

And Kung said

‘You old fool, come out of it,

Get up and do something useful.’

The serious artist does not ‘pretend to be receiving wisdom’; we have heard
Pound dilating on his quasi-automatic social functions. It is the essence of
the artist’s cruel dilemma that his just reaction against politicians’ and
journalists’ canons of usefulness drives him so perilously close to

... an Olympian apathein

In the presence of selected perceptions.^4

The descent into this Nirvana of the fastidious moth with the preciously-
cadenced name is chronicled with elaborate subtlety. The validity of his
perceptions is played off against ‘neo-Nietzschean clatter’; but meanwhile
the directness of the opening images, the red-beaked steeds, the glow of
porcelain, is being gradually overlaid by a crescendo of abstractions:
‘isolation,’ ‘examination,’ ‘elimination,’ ‘consternation,’ ‘undulation,’
‘concentration.’ The tone shifts from the sympathetic to the clinical:

Invitation, mere invitation to perceptivity

Gradually led him to the isolation

Which these presents place

Under a more tolerant, perhaps, examination.

The preservation of a critical distance both from the inadequacies of
Mauberley and from the irrelevantly active world of Mr. Nixon, Nietzsche,
and Bishop Bloughram, with its ‘discouraging doctrine of chances’, the
realization of an impersonality that extracts strength from both of the
antithetical cadres of the first twelve poems, is the major achievement of
these final pages. Mauberley’s disappearance into his dream-world is related
without approbation and without scorn:

A pale gold, in the aforesaid pattern,

The unexpected palms

Destroying, certainly, the artist’s urge,