Tarr. Wyndham Lewis

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СКАЧАТЬ of off-hand have more sensible, and on the whole prettier, wives than other people.”

      “Prettier wives?—You are describing a meaningless average.—The most suspicious fact about a distinguished man is the possession of a distinguished wife. But you might just as well say in answer to my Art statement that Sir Edward Leighton did not paint the decayed meat of humanity.”

      Hobson surged up a little in his chair and collapsed.—He had to appeal to his body to sustain the argument.

      “Neither did Raphael—I don’t see why you should drag Rembrandt in—Rembrandt⸺”

      “You’re going to sniff at Rembrandt!—You accuse me of following the fashions in my liking for Cubism. You are much more fashionable yourself. Would you mind my ‘dragging in’ cheese, high game⸺?”

      Hobson allowed cheeses with a rather drawn expression. But he did not see what that had to do with it, either.

      “It is not purely a question of appetite,” he said.

      “Sex, sir, is purely a question of appetite!” Tarr replied.

      Hobson inclined himself mincingly, with a sweet chuckle.

      “If it is pure sex, that is,” Tarr added.

      “Oh, if it is pure sex—that, naturally⸺” Hobson convulsed himself and crowed thrice.

      “Listen, Hobson!—You mustn’t make that noise. It’s very clever of you to be able to. But you will not succeed in rattling me by making me feel I am addressing a rooster⸺”

      Hobson let himself go in whoops and caws, as though Tarr had been pressing him to perform.

      When he had finished, Tarr said:

      “Are you willing to consider sex seriously, or not?”

      “Yes, I don’t mind.”—Hobson settled down, his face flushed from his late display.—“But I shall begin to believe before very long that your intentions are honourable as regards the fair Fräulein.—What exactly is your discourse intended to prove?”

      “Not the desirability of the marriage tie, any more than a propaganda for representation and anecdote in art. But if a man marries, or a great painter represents (and the claims and seductions of life are very urgent), he will not be governed in his choice by the same laws that regulate the life of an efficient citizen, a successful merchant, or the ideals of a health expert.”

      “I should have said that the considerations that precede a proposition of marriage had many analogies with the health expert’s outlook, the good citizen’s⸺”

      “Was Napoleon successful in life, or did he ruin himself and end his days in miserable captivity?—Passion precludes the idea of success. Failure is its condition.—Art and Sex when they are deep enough make tragedies, and not advertisements for Health experts, or happy endings for the Public, or social panaceas.”

      “Alas, that is true.”

      “Well, then, well, then, Alan Hobson, you scarecrow of an advanced fool-farm, deplorable pedant of a sophistic voice-culture⸺”

      “I? My voice—? But that’s absurd!—If my speech⸺”

      Hobson was up in arms about his voice: although it was not his.

      Tarr needed a grimacing, tumultuous mask for the face he had to cover.—The clown was the only rôle that was ample enough. He had compared his clowning with Hobson’s Pierrotesque and French variety.

      But Hobson, he considered, was a crowd.—You could not say he was an individual.—He was a set. He sat there, a cultivated audience.—He had the aplomb and absence of self-consciousness of numbers, of the herd—of those who know they are not alone.—Tarr was shy and the reverse by turns. He was alone. The individual is rustic.

      For distinguishing feature Hobson possessed a distinguished absence of personality.

      Tarr gazed on this impersonality, of crowd origin, with autocratic scorn.

      Alan Hobson was a humble investor.

      “But we’re talking at cross purposes, Hobson.—You think I am contending that affection for a dolt, like my fiancée, is in some way a merit. I do not mean that. Also, I do not mean that sex is my tragedy, but art.—I will explain why I am associated sexually with this pumpkin. First, I am an artist.—With most people, not describable as artists, all the finer part of their vitality goes into sex. They become third-rate poets during their courtship. All their instincts of drama come out freshly with their wives. The artist is he in whom this emotionality normally absorbed by sex is so strong that it claims a newer and more exclusive field of deployment.—Its first creation is the Artist himself, a new sort of person; the creative man. But for the first-rate poet, nothing short of a Queen or a Chimera is adequate for the powers of his praise.—And so on all through the bunch of his gifts. One by one his powers and moyens are turned away from the usual object of a man’s poetry, and turned away from the immediate world. One solitary thing is left facing a woman.—That is his sex, a lonely phallus.—Things are not quite so simple in actual fact as this. Some artists are less complete than others. More or less remains to the man.—Then the character of the artist’s creation comes in. What tendency has my work as an artist, a ready instance? You may have noticed that it has that of an invariable severity. Apart from its being good or bad, its character is ascetic rather than sensuous, and divorced from immediate life. There is no slop of sex in that. But there is no severity left over for the work of the cruder senses either. Very often with an artist whose work is very sensuous or human, his sex instinct, if it is active, will be more discriminating than with a man more fastidious and discriminating than he in his work. To sum up this part of my disclosure.—No one could have a coarser, more foolish, slovenly taste than I have in women. It is not even sluttish and abject, of the J. W. M. Turner type, with his washerwoman at Gravesend.—It is bourgeois, banal, pretty-pretty, a cross between the Musical Comedy stage and the ideal of the Eighteenth-Century gallant. All the delicate psychology another man naturally seeks in a woman, the curiosity of form, windows on other lives, love and passion, I seek in my work and not elsewhere.—Form would perhaps be thickened by child-bearing; it would perhaps be damaged by harlotry.—Why should sex still be active? That is a matter of heredity that has nothing to do with the general energies of the mind. I see I am boring you.—The matter is too remote!—But you have trespassed here, and you must listen.—I cannot let you off before you have heard, and shown that you understand.—If you do not sit and listen, I will write it all to you. You will be made to hear it!—And after I have told you this, I will tell you why I am talking to a fool like you!”

      “You ask me to be polite⸺”

      “I don’t mind how impolite you are so long as you listen.”

      “Well, I am listening—with interest.”

      Tarr was tearing, as he saw it, at the blankets that swaddled this spirit in its inner snobberies.—A bitter feast was steaming hot, and a mouth must be found to eat it. This beggar’s had to serve. It was, above all, an ear, all the nerves complete. He must get his words into it. They must not be swallowed at a gulp. They must taste, sting, and benefit by the meaning of an appetite.—He had something to say. It must be said while it was living. Once it was said, СКАЧАТЬ