Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/904

782 might have been disgracefully inspired to the extent of projecting as arithmetical, not to say dull, a classification of Eliot as that of Picasso by the author of certain rudimentary and not even ecclesiastical nonsense entitled The Caliph's Design. But (it is an enormous but) our so doing necessarily would have proved worthless, precisely for the reason that before an Eliot we become alive or intense as we become intense or alive before a Cézanne or a Lachaise: or since, as always in the case of superficial because vertical analysis, to attempt the boxing and labeling of genius is to involve in something inescapably rectilinear—a formula, for example—not the artist but the "critic."

However, we have a better reason. The last word on caricature was spoken as far back as 1913. "My dear it's all so perfectly ridiculous" remarked to an elderly Boston woman an elderly woman of Boston, as the twain made their noticeably irrevocable exeunt from that most colossal of all circusses, the (then in Boston) International. "My dear if some of the pictures didn't look like something it wouldn't be so amusing" observed, on the threshold, the e.B.w., adding "I should hate to have my portrait painted by any of those 'artists'!" "They'll never make a statue of me" stated with polyphiloprogenitive conviction the e.w.o.B.

Says Mr. Eliot.

In the case of Poems, to state frankly and briefly what we like may be as good a way as another of exhibiting our numerous "critical" incapacities. We like first, to speak from an altogether personal standpoint, that any and all attempts to lassoo Mr. Eliot with the Vorticist emblem have signally failed. That Mr. E. Pound (with whose Caesarlike refusal of the kingly crown we are entirely familiar) may not have coiled the rope whose fatal noose has, over a few unfortunate Britons, excludingly rather than includingly settled, makes little or no difference since the hand which threw the lariat and the bronc' which threw the steers alike belong to him. Be it said of this peppy gentleman that, insofar as he is responsible for possibly one-half of the most alive poetry and probably all of the least intense prose committed, during the last few years, in the American and English languages, he merits something