Yeats's 'dance' plays, derived from Japanese Noh drama. 'Deirdre': in the Ulster Cycle, woman chosen to be queen of Ulster before she elopes with Naoise (pronounced Neesha).
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INTRODUCTION [A GENERAL INTRODUCTION FOR MY WORK] / 2057
been cast up out of the whale's belly though I still remember the sound and sway that came from beyond its ribs,4 and, like the Queen in Paul Fort's ballad, 5 I smell of the fish of the sea. The contrapuntal structure of the verse, to employ a term adopted by Robert Bridges,6 combines the past and present. If I repeat the first line of Paradise Lost so as to emphasise its five feet I am among the folk singers, 'Of man's first disobedience and the fruit', but speak it as I should I cross it with another emphasis, that of passionate prose, 'Of man's first disobedience and the fruit', or 'Of man's first disobedience and the fruit', the folk song is still there, but a ghostly voice, an unvariable possibility, an unconscious norm. What moves me and my hearer is a vivid speech that has no laws except that it must not exorcise the ghostly voice. I am awake and asleep, at my moment of revelation, self- possessed in self-surrender; there is no rhyme, no echo of the beaten drum, the dancing foot, that would overset my balance. When I was a boy I wrote a poem upon dancing that had one good line: 'They snatch with their hands at the sleep of the skies.' If I sat down and thought for a year I would discover that but for certain syllabic limitations, a rejection or acceptance of certain elisions, I must wake or sleep.
The Countess Cathleen could speak a blank verse which I had loosened, almost put out of joint, for her need, because I thought of her as mediaeval and thereby connected her with the general European movement. For Deirdre and Cuchulain and all the other figures of Irish legend are still in the whale's belly.
IV. WhitherP The young English poets reject dream and personal emotion; they have thought out opinions that join them to this or that political party; they employ an intricate psychology, action in character, not as in the ballads character in action, and all consider that they have a right to the same close attention that men pay to the mathematician and the metaphysician. One of the more distinguished has just explained that man has hitherto slept but must now awake.7 They are determined to express the factory, the metropolis, that they may be modern. Young men teaching school in some picturesque cathedral town, or settled for life in Capri or in Sicily, defend their type of metaphor by saying that it comes naturally to a man who travels to his work by Tube.8 I am indebted to a man of this school who went through my work at my request, crossing out all conventional metaphors,9 but they seem to me to have rejected also those dream associations which were the whole art of Mallarme.1 He had topped a previous wave. As they express not what the Upanishads call 'that ancient Self' but individual intellect, they have the right to choose the man in the Tube because of his objective importance. They attempt to kill the whale, push the Renaissance higher yet, out-think Leonardo;2 their verse kills the folk
4. Cf. Jonah 2.10: 'And the Lord spake unto the Lewis (1904-1972). fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land.' 8. London's underground railway. Lewis taught in 5. 'La Reine a la Mer' ('The Queen of the Sea,' the spa town of Cheltenham in the early 1930s. 1894-96), by the French poet Paul Fort (1872-D. H. Lawrence lived in Capri and Sicily in the 1960). early 1920s. 6. English poet (1844-1930), who stressed the 9. Ezra Pound did this circa 1910. poetic tension of the counterpoint between regular 1. StSphane Mallarme (1842-1898), French meters and the rhythm of poetry as actually spo-poet. ken. 2. Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), Italian artist 7. Perhaps W. H. Auden (1907-1973) or C. Day and inventor.
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2058 / E. M. FORSTER
ghost and yet would remain verse. I am joined to the 'Irishry' and I expect a counter-Renaissance. No doubt it is part of the game to push that Renaissance; I make no complaint; I am accustomed to the geometrical arrangement of history in A Vision, but I go deeper than 'custom' for my convictions. When I stand upon O'Connell Bridge3 in the half-light and notice that discordant architecture, all those electric signs, where modern heterogeneity has taken physical form, a vague hatred comes up out of my own dark and I am certain that wherever in Europe there are minds strong enough to lead others the same vague hatred rises; in four or five or in less generations this hatred will have issued in violence and imposed some kind of rule of kindred. I cannot know the nature of that rule, for its opposite fills the light; all I can do to bring it nearer is to intensify my hatred. I am no Nationalist, except in Ireland for passing reasons; State and Nation are the work of intellect, and when you consider what comes before and after them they are, as Victor Hugo said of something or other, not worth the blade of grass God gives for the nest of the linnet.4
1937 1961
3. Over Dublin's river Liffey. 4. Small finch. Victor Hugo (1802-1885), French writer. E. M. FORSTER 1879- 1970 Born in London, Edward Morgan Forster was an infant when his father, an architect of Welsh extraction, died of consumption. An only child, Forster was raised by his paternal great-aunt and his mother, a member of a family distinguished over several generations for its evangelical religion and its philanthropic reformist activities. He was educated at Tonbridge School (the 'Sawston' of his novel The Longest Journey), where he suffered from the cruelty of his classmates and other tribulations of being a day boy at a boarding school. As a student at King's College, Cambridge, he found an intellectual companionship that influenced his entire life. The friends he made were to become, with Forster, members of the 'Bloomsbury Group'?so called because some of its prominent figures lived in the Bloomsbury district of London? which included the writers Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf, the art historians Clive Bell and Boger Fry, and the economist John Maynard Keynes. Forster's main interest was always in personal relations, the 'little society' we make for ourselves with our friends. He cast a wary eye on society at large, his point of view being always that of the independent liberal, suspicious of political slogans and catchwords, critical of Victorian attitudes and British imperialism.
After graduation from Cambridge, Forster visited Greece and spent some time in Italy in 1901, and this experience influenced him permanently; throughout his life he tended to set Greek and Italian peasant life in symbolic contrast to the stuffy and repressed life of middle-class England. Both Greek mythology and Italian Renaissance art opened up to him a world of vital exuberance, and most of his work is concerned with ways of discovering such a quality in personal relationships amid the complexities and distortions of modern life. He began writing as a contributor to the newly founded libera] Independent Review in 1903, and in 1905 published his first novel, Where
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THE OTHER BOAT / 2059
Angels Fear to Tread, a tragicomic projection of conflicts between refined English gentility and coarse Italian vitality.
Forster's second novel, The Longest Journey (1907), examines the differences between living and dead relationships with much incidental satire of English public- school education and English notions of respectability. A Room with a View (1908) explores the nature of love with a great deal of subtlety, using (as with his first novel) Italy as a liberating agent for the British tourists whom he also satirizes. Howards End (1910) involves a conflict between two families, one interested in art and literature and the other only in money and business, and probes the relation between inward feeling and outward action, between the kinds of reality in which people live. 'Only connect!' exclaims one of the characters. 'Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and
