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EZRA POUND 221
"Intelligentsia is mostly inducant because it runs on snobbism
and fragments.
". . . In this day the conventional precision of line will give
way, interesting details, suggestions of luxury will augment as
people lose an ethical basis of life. As they lose passion for justice,
as they lose the love of real distinction between one idea and
another, this diagnosis will replace love, analysis will give way to
quarrels. . . . Honest men, when a dogma or style has been
falsified, will turn analytical. They will be partial.
". . . But what is temperament in a sound man becomes by
the excess diseased in a weak man, unbalanced, hard to divide it
at a certain point but if one drips with the courage, one grows
tolerant first of weakness, then accustomed to weakness, and then
flops into squalor.
"Mediterranean sanity and beauty, order—the world was saner
when the cult [transcriber has this down as 'coat'] of ugliness did
not engage the attention of anyone. . . . Any deflection of the
aim is a vagrance. It is a false repining. It is green fruit going
rotten.
"Beardsley was a sick man who knew he had to make a name
quickly if he wanted to make it, personal wish, not believing in
what art is or ought to be. When he had time to learn to paint,
his youthful impulse was towards pre-Raphaelite beauty. His
early drawings like Verne Jules. That's what he wanted, Yeats
asked him why he hadn't stuck to it. Well, Beardsley was no
slouch. He was a courageous invalid. He was a heroic invalid, up
to the point of his force. He didn't lie to himself or his friends
in private. He knew that beauty is so difficult. He said, Beauty is
so difficult.
"We have all seen the cult of beauty turned and slapped. We
have seen an artist who won't take pains, who will not face the
work needed to paint a good picture or write a good novel or
poem. All fragmentary, nothing total. In the great perversion, the
great decadence, when the painting is made to sell, that's when it
is, when the artist stops wanting to live, wears his hair long,
must eat but it's secondary to his desire to paint or to make . . .
"The futurist rooms are always an affirmation of propaganda
that could get along by itself without any painting whatever. I