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EZRA POUND 175
comes cheaply. He wrote to his old friend T. Sturge Moore, veteran
of their all-night wine and poetry sessions in London,
"Ezra Pound has just been in. He says 'Spengler is a Wells who
has founded himself on German scholarship instead of English
journalism.' He is sunk in Frobenius, Spengler's German source,
and finds him the most interesting person. Frobenius originated the
idea that cultures, including arts and sciences, arise out of races,
express those races as if they were fruit and leaves in a preordained
order, and perish with them; and the two main symbols, the Cave
and the Boundless. He proved from his logic, some German told
Ezra, that a certain civilization must have once existed at a certain
spot in Africa, and then went and dug it up. He proves his case all
through by African research. I can not read German so must get
him second hand. He has confirmed a conception I have had for
many years, a conception that has freed me from British liberalism
and all its dreams. The one heroic sanction is that of the last battle
of the Norse gods, or a gay struggle without hope. Long ago I used
to puzzle Maud Gonne by always ultimately avowing defeat as a
test. And our literary movement would be worthless but for its
defeat. Science is the criticism of Myth. There would be no Darwin
had there been no Book of Genesis, no electron but for the Greek
atomic myth; and when the fire of criticism is finished there is not
even a drift of ashes on the pyre. Sexual desire dies because every
touch consumes the Myth, and yet a Myth that can not be so
consumed becomes a spectre." 24
In his old age, Yeats became quite philosophical, and the philosophy
stated here is the one which is evolving from man's life in
the twentieth century. As a Virginian, I knew defeat; therefore, I
was able to know culture. Though his reference to "the last battle
of the Norse gods" strikes terror into the hearts of the subhumans,
it is the basic concept of modern life.
Frobenius became one of the principal contributors to Ezra's
paideuma. One of his first efforts on my behalf was an attempt to
get me a scholarship from the Bollingen Foundation, so that I
could translate the works of Frobenius into English. Except for one
or two earlier works, they have never been translated; the work of
his epigones, such as Malinowski and Margaret Mead, is seen
everywhere, and passes for basic anthropology in America.