Emerging Views of Byzantium, 1850-1930: Germs of the Modern and Its Paradoxes

,^ «*" 1 ' Γ ft î:3 U fÃ- •Ία Ji f ν ν ν V Ï€!<Ρ^^[V áffil /**S/*^ -*·*? tt^a*" ill ι 1 4* *M1 » » Emerging Views of Byzantium, 1850-1930: Germs of the Modern and Its Paradoxes Jane Spirit Open University OSCAR WILDE AND W. B. YEATS were two witnesses of the British Empire's decline who sought inspiration in that other, long defunct, empire of Byzantium. Both traveled actually and metaphorically towards the domes and mosaics of Ravenna, Sicily and Constantinople .1 They did so in the company of many other writers; whether historians, aestheticians, novelists or playwrights. In this discovery of Byzantium can be seen many of the contradictions inherent in modernism . Broadly speaking, from the 1850s onwards, Byzantium was appropriated by an intellectual elite as a symbol of artistic excellence. What intrinsic qualities allowed Byzantium to become both a private retreat of the imagination and an embodiment of the artist's political role? How could it remain a familiar image of Empire in decline as well as an alien culture offering the post-colonialist intellectual sanctuary? Part of the answer to these questions may lie in perceptions of its geographical and historical positioning as a meeting place between East and West and the fusion of Islamic, Christian, Roman and Greek influences it therefore represented. As Wilde acknowledged in a letter of 1889 it was necessary to go East for wisdom.2 Byzantium compounded this by its marriage of two artistic traditions: "Greek art, with its intellectual sense of form, and its quick sympathy with humanity; Oriental art, with its gorgeous materialism."3 Such a union allowed a replaying of the Romantic use of the "East" to augment "Western" imagination. At Byzantium, the pagan and primitive associations of the Orient mingled with images of a Christian hierarchial and ordered society to provide a heady alternative to Victorian culture. 157 ELT 38:2 1995 Those images of the Byzantine most readily available to the Victorian public celebrated its exotic and glamorous Eastern nature as well as its continued associations with the classical revival. Contemporary photographs of the Byzantine room at the Sydenham Crystal Palace suggest a restrained Greek style of interior while featuring a languorous lady reclining on a couch.4 For the 1883 production of W. G. Wills's Claudian, set in fifth century Byzantium, G. W. Godwin assiduously revived both Byzantine architecture and appropriate Greek costume.6 A comparable architectural accuracy, though to different ends, was boasted by the producers of the 1893-1894 Olympia exhibition "Revels of the East." Modelled upon the highly successful replication of Venice in 1891, "Revels" offered nothing less than the recreation of Constantinople. Shops, bazaars and harems were relatively easy to fabricate, but features such as the Golden Horn, tower of Galata and underground cisterns required an "industrial community" of 3,000 for their construction and were visited by over 30,000 on opening day.6 The focal point was the immense "Grand Ballet of the East" in which the young Duke of Orleigh journeyed from England to Istanbul via Venice. The glittering spectacle of his arrival, as described by the local press, emphasized erotic and mystic possibilities: "Ladies of the harem ride in gorgeous litters. . . . Persian princes and Arabians of high rank are guarded by soldiers and attended by beautiful slaves; . . . priests clad in robes, impart a scene of sombre hue to the scene of gaiety. . . .^ Punch lightheartedly commemorated the show's appeal as a means of escape to the exotic alternative landscape of contemporary Turkey: "I FLY TO ISTAMBOL"—Byron Yes, nemine dissentiente This shillingworth is "something like!" At last, the Golden Horn of plenty! "Constantinople" "taikes the caiqueV* For cultural commentators with more serious intentions, the "foreign" qualities of the city were combined with images of the slow decay of its empire to create a more subversive exotic. Eighteenth-century commentators had castigated the Byzantine state. Having not progressed it had then "merely-indecently-refused to die."9 Correspondingly Gibbon found that the Byzantine people presented a "dead uniformity of abject vices."10 Nor was he impressed by the Empire's artistic achievements, commenting that while a visitor might be misled into supposing Sancta Sophia encapsulated the divine, 158 Spirit : views op Byzantium it was of no greater significance than "the vilest insect that crawls upon the surface of the temple."11 A hundred years later the same building was to epitomize for William Morris all that Byzantium represented in its glorious amalgamation of cultures. Sancta Sophia "has gathered to itself all those elements of change which, having been kept apart for so long, were at last mingling and seething, and bringing about so many changes, so much of death and life... it is the living child and the fruitful mother of art, past and future."12 Such veneration was the result of the reappraisal of Byzantine history and aesthetics by reference to John Ruskin, Morris, Roger Fry and T. E. Hulme. It was also part of a continued Romantic preoccupation with great cities, in this case Constantinople , which, for all their splendours, remained emblems of human frailty in general and the inevitable demise of individual genius. In 1812 Lord Byron had invited his reader to gaze upon Constantinople: Look on its broken arch, its ruin'd wall, Its chambers desolate, and portals foul: Yes, this was once Ambition's airy hall, The dome of Thought, the palace of the Soul.13 Similarly for those later poets who found themselves at Ravenna, the inspirational qualities of the Byzantine were inextricably bound up with decay. The "sepulchral" splendor of the town noted by Arthur Symons and its "still and silent attitude of fixed meditation and remembrance," echoed J. A. Symonds's comment on the "grave and glittering mosaics," the "gorgeous gloom of the tombs."14 Symonds's impression was reminiscent in turn of that "sad solemnity" Wilde had described in his Newdigate Prize poem of 1878 in which the town was envisaged as the guardian of its own Romantic tradition. Byzantine Ravenna had become allied with Nerval's Romantic Orient: "identified with commemorative absence."15 This was of course, a necessary absence. For Wilde, Byzantium empowered the artist by making it impossible to return to "Life and Nature" or to be identified again with what is "vulgar, common and uninteresting."16 Superimposed upon Gibbon's images of monotonous decay were those of individual vitality achieved by the retrieval of art from the domain of naturalism. The resulting Byzantium was compounded of seemingly contradictory elements, its Christian and abstract aesthetic celebrated alongside its opulent and elegant corruption. Appealing as they did to different audiences and critical expectations, novels and plays with a Byzantine setting emphasized these differing elements. The historical novels largely followed the lead of Sir Walter 159 ELT 38:2 1995 Scott's Count Robert of Paris (1831) in setting their action at the time of the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453. Their common theme was the triumph of individual integrity in the midst of immorality. This allowed writers to provide a degree of titillation for the reader, while defending the Byzantines against the assumption that they were merely "the Turkey of Byron, always thirsting for blood, spilling it senselessly, and crying out for more."17 One interesting example is the novel by J. M. Neale, founder member of the Camden society and exponent of Eastern liturgy. Neale had acknowledged the decadence of later Byzantine life, but was impressed by the religious stability of its Church whose "venerable liturgies exhibit doctrine unchanged, and discipline uncorrupted."18 Similarly in his fiction Theodora Phranza (1857), the Byzantine characters acknowledged their decadence while the heroine was presented as an emblem of an honorable Byzantine tradition, heroically marrying Mohammed to preserve the city's peace.19 The morally incorruptible heroines of the novels have as their counterparts the femmes fatales of Victorian and Edwardian dramas. Whether in the case of Theophano in Frederic Harrison's Nicephorus, set in tenth-century Byzantium, or of the Victorian plays portraying Theodora in the sixth, the Empire and Empress were depicted at the height of their power and corruption. Such historical settings made possible a variety of lavish interior scenes such as the Blachnae palace and the circus. They also allowed the audience a frisson of danger. "The foundation of a palace is a prison—beneath the splendour of the throne is the darkness of the grave," remarked the Empress in Watts's Theodora of 1866.20 Their play was upon this heady mixture of potent beauty undermined by corruption and death. In Victorien Sardou's Theodora the Empress was depicted both as inherently evil and as the inevitable product of a corrupt society. This "gloomy drama" opened in Paris in 1884 and seems to have caused something of a sensation due to "the masterful assumption of the title-role by Madame Bernhardt and to the superb mounting."21 More bizarre still was Michael Field's unstageable drama "Equal Love," published in the Pageant along with an early Yeats story.22 In the play political expediency leads Justinian to assist Theodora in killing her illegitimate son Zuhair who has arrived at the palace. There follows a ritualistic scene in which Zuhair, accepting he must die, requests decapitation by his mother using the Emperor's sword and wearing full 160 Spirit : views op Byzantium imperial array. Justinian then forgives Theodora for her past life because she has murdered her own son to eradicate its traces. In its intensity of corruption and inversion of accepted gender stereotypes the play clearly owes much to Wilde's Salome, published in 1893. Field's Theodora is reminiscent also of Wilde's Myrrhina in the fragment "La Sainte Courtisane," whose beauty attracts all kings and Emperors: "When the Emperor of Byzantium heard of me he left his/ porphyry chamber and set sail in his galleys."23 This Byzantium of intense desire, cruelty and beauty occupied a stage outside the main theatre of Victorian cultural concerns. It epitomized the separation for which it also provided a metaphor, so that in 1890 Symonds was to question whether artists could ever "enter once again into vital rapport with the people ... or is art destined to subside lower and lower into a kind of Byzantine decrepitude, as toy of a so-called cultivated minority?"24 Certainly Byzantium represented the inversion and merger of familiar opposites—Greek and Oriental, pagan and Christian, vital and corrupt, male arch and female dome. As such it was celebrated as offering an alternative vision to be shared by those who saw themselves as outsiders. At Byzantium after all "the visible things of life are transmuted into artistic conventions, and the things that life has not are invented and fashioned for her delight."25 Curiously, for others, it offered the vision not of an elite community but of a revitalized democracy in which the arts could be reclaimed for the people. Byzantium , with its order, stability and Christian aesthetic provided an image of the necessary "rapport" between artist and society and Byzantine aesthetic and social values were extolled as part of the wider gothic revival by Lord Lindsay, Ruskin and Morris. By the 1900s these contrary perceptions were to be brought together. For those like T. E. Hulme who venerated Byzantine order and stability, the metaphor was no longer a means of transforming popular culture, but rather of presaging the collapse of Western humanist culture from without its walls. The rewriting of Byzantine history that made Hulme's vision possible took place from the mid-nineteenth century onwards as images of monotony gave way to those of steadfast endurance. By 1900 Frederic Harrison could acknowledge the oppressive nature of Byzantine society while defending it as having "kept alive the principles of order, stability and continuity."26 Such duality was made possible by the new historians' reluctance to measure the Byzantine against a Victorian moral yardstick . "To praise Justinian's absolutism in the sixth century is not to 161 ELT 38:2 1995 praise absolutism," insisted J. B. Bury in the 1880s.27 Such writing ensured that, at worst, Byzantine history need no longer be seen as a threat to Victorian values. Other writers went further still, incorporating Byzantium into their vision of a unified Christian culture as a kind of earlier Gothic. As early as 1840 Thomas Hope had identified the important part played by Byzantine architecture in the transition from classical angularity to Gothic arch.28 By 1847 Lindsay was writing more generally in praise of Byzantium, citing it as an object lesson in how meaning is more important than representation.29 Ruskin also envisaged the Byzantine style as a custodian of some purer spirit which was later to be reincarnated in Europe. In The Stones of Venice he wrote of how "the germ... of t}he Gothic arrangement is already found in the Byzantine."30 In St. Mark's Rest (1884), he strongly defended the symbolism of the Byzantine style as its greatest attraction: I gave the bas-relief of the twelve sheep and little caprioling lamb for a general type of all Byzantine art, to fix in your mind at once, respecting it, that its intense first character is symbolism. The thing represented means more than itself,—is a sign, or letter, more than an image.3i This kind of renewed interest can be linked to some specific revivals of Byzantine architecture and decoration. The best known example is the domed Westminster Cathedral (1895-1905), designed by J. F. Bentley in accordance with Cardinal Vaughan's insistence upon something Italian or Byzantine. Also in London stands the Greek Cathedral of Sancta Sophia, designed by Oldrid Scott in 1877, in which the interior use of brick and stone bands with marble and mosaics, as well as the central dome on pendentives, suggest the Byzantine tradition. BurneJones acknowledged the influence of the Ravenna mosaics when executing his commission to decorate Street's American Protestant Church in Rome in the 1880s.32 Such examples, however, do not necessarily equate with the significance accorded to Byzantine decorative art by Morris, for whom specific forms were less important than the ideal image they evoked. Morris wrote of Byzantine art as encapsulating the kind of corporate existence which was the true lesson of nature neglected by Renaissance naturalism . Byzantium conjured the image of a "popular" art,33 of a "collective rather than individual genius"34 which had existed before the Renaissance and could exist again to bestow the true dignity of labor upon all. Upon the accepted account of a violent history, Morris placed a contrary 162 SPIRIT : VIEWS OF BYZANTIUM picture of continued human creativity. For him Sancta Sophia was the apotheosis of the generic principle, the symbol of a "glorious art, full of growth and hope,... that which springs from popular impulse, from the partnership of all men, greater and little. . . ."3B Morris's disciple, Lethaby, was the joint author of an influential study of Byzantine architecture in 1894. Once again the emphasis of the introduction was not so much upon the revival of Byzantine styles as upon the revival of the collective world view regarded as characteristically Byzantine and closed with a plea for the freedom of the individual artist: It is evident that the style cannot be copied by our attempting to imitate Byzantine builders; only by being ourselves and free, can our work be reasonable, and if reasonable, like theirs, universal, L'ART C'EST D'ETRE ABSOLUMENT SOI-MEME.» Aestheticians in the new century continued this admiration for a religious and symbolic art, but the emphasis shifted from Morris's notion of a popular art to the image of a society in which the mass rightly reverenced the mysterious and powerful forces revealed through art. Unity remained as an ideal, but the stress was upon the social stability that could maintain it. This was no longer the despised rigidity of Gibbon's Byzantium, but a desired stasis paradoxically celebrated by those with equal affinities to the Empire in collapse. Both Fry and Hulme moved from an earlier admiration for Giotto towards Byzantine aesthetic values as they saw them. In 1901, for example, Fry had written in praise of the dramatic and vital qualities of Giotto which had helped to overcome the effete deadness of the Byzantine. By 1920, however, Fry was adding a note to the earlier essay, cUsclaiming its content.37 Instead he invoked Byzantine art amongst his list of influences upon contemporary art at the time of the post-impressionist exhibition.38 In 1926 this list included "Oriental" and "Negro" forms and celebrated the Byzantine revival as evidence of new artistic priorities, that "renewed interest in Byzantine art which everywhere manifested itself with the breakdown of Renaissance tyranny."39 Again in 1930 he championed the Byzantine as representing the recovery of the object of art from the predominance of the representative side of pictorial art.40 One factor in Fry's rediscovery of Byzantium as an emblem of abstract art was his visit to Constantinople with the Bells in 1911. There was certainly an impact upon his companions. Vanessa Bell wrote to Fry that she was trying to paint as if "mosaicing"41 and Clive was to celebrate 163 ELT 38:2 1995 the year 526 in which San Vitale was built at Ravenna, as the year in which "significant form" had achieved its victory: This alone seems to me sure; since the Byzantine primitives set their mosaics at Ravenna no artist in Europe has created forms of greater significance unless it be Cezanne."42 Bell's admiration extended to Byzantine society in which the acceptance of the notion of a natural aristocracy allowed the cultivation of abstract artistic forms alien to the majority.43 Hulme's admiration for the Byzantine revealed a similar discomfort with democracy. Although he had greatly admired San Vitale during a visit to Ravenna in 1911, it was his meeting with Wilhelm Worringer in 1912 that led to his praise of Byzantine art "because it expresses an attitude I agree with."44 Hulme adopted Worringer's distinction between empathetic and abstract responses to experience, the latter resulting in an art form which, like the Byzantine, eschewed naturalism in order to represent the eternal separation between man and god. For the modern Westerner, steeped in Renaissance and Romantic traditions, Byzantine art was bound to seem strange since "the disgust with the trivial and accidental characteristics of living shapes, the searching after an austerity , a perfection and rigidity which vital things can never have, lead here to the use of forms which can almost be called geometrical... which convey religious emotion."45 Western alienation from the forms and religious intensity of Byzantine art merely confirmed the extent of its own depravity. Hulme regarded the re-evaluation of Byzantine art as much more than archaeology or ethnology. It suggested to him. the breaking up of the whole humanist tradition, based on Renaissance confidence in man. Evidence of this discomforture and impending fragmentation could be found in the works of Cezanne, Bomberg, Lewis and Epstein.48 In Hulme's writing, as in Fry's and Bell's, ironies abounded. Byzantium stood for order and spirituality, but its adoption as an emblem had more to do with the furore of changing forms in verbal and visual arts. To paraphrase Ruskin on Gothic, it would seem that in Byzantium we find germs of the modern and all its paradoxes. As a focus for contradictions, it offered a tentative image of that "Unity of Being," the prospect of which so delighted Yeats.47 He too was drawn to the image of sixth-century Byzantium because "in early Byzantium , maybe never before or since in recorded history, religious, aesthetic and practical life were one."48 In the Byzantine poems, however, the difficulty of sustaining such an ideal became apparent. The city's 164 SPIRIT : VIEWS OF BYZANTIUM image disintegrated, like modernism itself, because of its aspiration to unite contrary urges without compromising their absolute differences. In "Sailing to Byzantium" (1927), the artist travels towards the new life offered by a rigid, absolutist society with keen aesthetic interests. Yet the journey is equally towards dissolution, decay and the loss of artistic integrity. The demands of nature and art cannot successfully be separated . In identifying hünself with the golden bird which must be "set" on its golden perch to sing, the artist reaches the pinnacle of aesthetic achievement by transmuting bodily form into eternal presence. Yet in doing so he becomes only a more glorified but more limited version of the "Tattered coat upon a stick" that he was. While he is no longer frightened of his old scarecrow self, he cannot be free of those ties to the natural world to whom he sings. Neither the abstract or naturalistic aesthetic urges can be satisfactorily fulfilled. This transmutation of the individual presaged the later fragmentation of the city in "Byzantium" (1930). Momentarily opposites may be held in separate embrace, "death-in life and life-in-death," before dissolution subsumes the ideal. Out of this dissolution, however, new approaches emerge, those "fresh images that yel/ fresh images beget." In the closing lines of the poem itself these emergent images seem once again to offer a reformulation of an ideal in which contradictions may be held together in a separate but indivisible form within "that dolphintorn , that gong-tormented sea." The "sea" of natural generation, familiar from the earlier poem, is interwoven with motifs of eternal dolphins and ritualistic gongs. At the same time, within each hyphenated pairing, the tearing and tormenting impress the notion of human frailty, the reality of pain that cannot be uncoupled from aesthetic abstraction. So, while such permutations of contraries may offer some postmodernist vision, they also entrench the reader in suffering. The concentration of the poem remains upon Byzantium as a vision of modernism in which the monumental energy of its construction is associated inevitably with disjunction and collapse: "Marbles of the dancing floor/ Break bitter furies of complexity." It is as if Byzantium can only be identified through it decadence, its life defined by absence rather than energy. As Pound wrote: a little flame for a little conserved in the Imperial ballet, never danced in a theatre Kept as Justinian left it.49 165 ELT 38:2 1995 It was the final impossibility of Byzantium, of satisfactorily separating or uniting the perceived need for artistic creativity with an acknowledgement of personal and political decay, that made it so potent a symbol. Occupying as it did a metaphorical as well as geographical middle ground, Byzantium stood for a familiar Western culture in crisis and for some post-colonial world to come. Here then was an ideal destination for the writers briefly considered in this article, no matter whether they were drawn towards the abyss of decadent Byzantium or towards that more abstract city precariously perched upon the religious and moral high ground. Notes 1. Wilde visited Ravenna in 1877 and his prizewinning poem about the city was published in 1878. Yeats was to visit Ravenna, in 1907, and Sicily, with the Pounds, in 1925. See Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987), 69. For a fuller discussion of the background to Ye^its's discussion of Byzantium, see D. J. Gordon and Ian Fletcher, "Byzantium," in Images of a Poet (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1961), 81-89. 2. From a letter to Justin Huntly MOarthy on the publication of MOarth^s prose translation of The Rubaiyat in May 1889. Published in More Letters of Oscar Wilde, Rupert Hart-Davis, ed. (London: John Murray, 1985), 83. 3. From a review article that first appeared in Woman's World in 1888. Reprinted in Reviews, Robert Ross, ed. (London: Methuen, 1908), 330. 4. Slides 83662,83664 in the Slide Library of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Kensington, U. K. 5. John Stokes, Resistible Theatres (London: Paul Elek Books, 1972), 43-44. 6. The Times, 27 December 1893, p. 8, columns 1 and 2. 7. West London Observer, 6 January 1894, p. 2, column 1. 8. Punch, 1894,1:17. 9. Norman Baynes, Byzantine Studies and Other Essays (London: Athlone Press, 1955), 25. 10. Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 2nd ed. (1787: repr. London and New York: Dent and Dutton, 1910), V: 73. 11. Ibid, IV: 188. 12. William Morris, The History of Pattern Designing" (1882), in Collected Works (London and New York: Longman Green, 1924), XXII: 208. 13. The Poetical Works of Byron (London: Oxford University Press, 1912), 190. 14. Arthur Symons, Cities of Italy (London: Dent, 1907), 177; J. A. Symonds, Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece (London: Smith, Elder, 1898), II: 11. 15. Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1978), 184. 16. Oscar Wilde, TheDecayofLying"(1889),in27ie WbrAio^OscarMideOiondon, Collins, 1966), 979. 17. Marion Crawford, Paul Patoff (London: Macmillan, 1887), II: 132. 18. J. M. Neale, A History of the Holy Eastern Church (London: Joseph Masters, 1850), 1:1. 19. Other novels with a Byzantine setting include those of Henry Pottinger, Blue and Green, 1879 (sixth century setting); J. M. Ludlow, SirRaouL· A Tale of the Theft of an Empire, 1905 (crusades setting); Lew Wallace, The Prince of India or Why Constantinople Fell, 1893; A. H. Wall, The Fall of Constantinople , 1897; and J. M. Ludlow, The Captain oftheJanizaries, 1886 (all with fifteenth-century settings). 166 SPIRIT : VIEWS OF BYZANTIUM 20. Phillip Watts, Theodora: Actress and Empress (London: T. H. Lacy, 1866), 48. 21. These quotations are from a collection of newspaper cuttings, bound under the title The Russo-Turkish War," but in fact all relate to the play's production in Paris. British Museum, 12620.k.812 . 22. W. B. Yeats, "Costello the Proud, Oona McDermott, and the Bitter Tongue," Pageant, December 1896,2-13. 23. Oscar Wilde, "La Sainte Courtisane," in Miscellanies, Robert Ross, ed. (London: Methuen, 1908), 236. 24. J. A. Symonds, Essays Speculative and Suggestive (London: Chapman and Hall, 1890), II: 56-57. 25. Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying" (1889), in The Works of Oscar Wilde (London: Collins, 1966), 220. 26. Frederic Harrison, Byzantine History in the Early Middle Ages (London: Macmillan, 1900), 9. 27. J. B. Bury, A History of the Later Roman Empire (London: Macmillan, 1889), 1:355. 28. Thomas Hope, An Historical Essay on Architecture, 3rd ed. (London: John Murray, 1840), 11. 29. A. W. C. Lindsay, Sketches of the History of Christian Art, 2nd ed. (1847; repr. London and Edinburgh: John Murray, 1885), 1:4-5. 30. John Ruskin, "The Stones of Venice II (1853), in Complete Works, E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, eds. (London: George Allen, 1903), XXIV: 280. 31. John Ruskin, "St. Mark's Rest" (1884), Ibid., XXIV: 280. 32. For Bume-Jones's description of Ravenna, see Malcolm Bell Edward Burne-Jones: A Record and Review (London and New York: George Bell, 1893), 74. 33. William Morris, The Age of the People" (1879), in Collected Works, XXII: 34. 34. William Morris, "Art and the Beauty of the Earth" (1881), Ibid., 159. 35. William Morris, The History of Pattern Designing" (1882), Ibid., 230. 36. W. R. Lethaby and Harold Swainson, The Church of Sancta Sophia, Constantinople (London: Macmillan, 1894), vi. 37. Roger Fry, Vision and Design (1920; London: Pelican, 1937), 112-49. 38. S. K. Tillyard, The Impact of Modernism 1900-1920 (London: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, 1988), 222. 39. Roger Fry, Transformations (London: Chatte and Windus, 1926), 204. 40. Roger Fry, Henri Matisse (Paris: Chroniques du Jour, 1930), 13. 41. Quoted from MS in King's College Library, Cambridge, United Kingdom, in Letters of Roger Fry, ed. Denys Sutton (London: Chatto and Windus, 1972), I: 40. 42. Clive Bell, Art (1913; New York: Capricorn Books, 1988), 94. 43. See John Carey's discussion of Bell's work, particularly Civilization, 1928, in The Intellectuals and the Masses (London: Faber and Faber, 1992). 44. From The New Age, 1913, given by S. K. Tillyard in The Impact of Modernism 1900-1920,222. 45. T. E. Hulme, Speculations, Herbert Read, ed. (1924; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), 82. 46. Ibid., 102-103. 47. "I delighted in every age where poet and artist confined themselves gladly to some inherited subject matter known to the whole people, for I thought that in man and race alike there is something called 'unity of being*." See W. B. Yeats, The Trembling of the Veil," 1,1916, in Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1977), 190. 48. W. B. Yeats, A Vision, A Reissue with the Author's Final Revisions (1925; London: Macmillan, 1961), 279. 49. Ezra Pound, The Cantos (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 466. 167 ...