He (1971)

HE* CYRIL O. HOULEf Our theme tonight is the nurturing of genius. Some of those who possess it, like Mozart or Shakespeare, seem to flourish without forethought or care. Most of the gifted must cultivate their powers, though they may suggest—and even believe—that the natural force which created their brilliance also disciplined it. But a few of those who go far beyond normal accomplishment not only use a carefully mastered craftsmanship but are eager to write about what they have learned. The greatest of them was a man who chose a narrow framework for the expression of his art, but, by ardent labor, so expanded its scope that his thought influences the lives of all of us—literary artists, scholars, or common folk. He was, it has been said, "easy to hate, but still easier to quote." He was equally easy to love, and it is well to begin this account with the story of one who did so. I When Edith Sitwell was eleven years old, she was required to memorize Casablanca, the poem which begins: "The boy stood on the burning deck whence all but him had fled." The Victorian era has been noted for the violence of the revolutions mounted against it, but perhaps not even the emotion which motivated Marx or Freud was stronger than the choked fury of little Edith when compelled to master this piece of verse. Her revolt took an interesting form: She fell deeply in love with the next poet whose work she read. He seemed to her to be incomparably graceful, blending profundity of feeling with mastery of content and sureness of touch. For him, she * This paper was written for the Chicago Literary Club. It was read at the annual .ladies' night celebration (May 25, 1970), and the title was picked with that fact in mind. A pleasant tradition of the club leads many authors to select obscure or ambiguous titles whose meaning is revealed somewhere within the paper itself. In the present case, this tradition is carried to its ultimate conclusion. The paper is reprinted with the permission of the club. + Professor of education, University of Chicago. 94 I Cyril O. Houle · He developed a lifelong crush excessive even in a school-girl but odd indeed when expressed by the awesome Dame Edith, whose intimidating force in English letters led her to call herself "an electric eel in a pond of catfish." By the age of forty-three, though the flame of her adoration had still not dwindled to a steady glow, she was able to set down a biography of the man, she worshipped. The frontispiece is an engraving of a slender and willowy but very mature Edith, gazing deeply into the eyes of a bust of her hero, and wreathing him with a garland of laurel. The object of her adulation was, she concedes, a "little, deformed creature," a "crippled hunchback" who was "liable to bursts of fury," who was "tortuous in his dealings" and "capable of suppressing or altering passages in his letters which might not exhibit him in the light in which he wished to appear," who was "uncandid" and who lived "in an atmosphere of spells, enchantments, and fairy tales," many of them created by himself. And yet, she adds, he was a "creature of genius," "the purest of our artists," "beyond all praise," "perhaps the most flawless artist our race has produced," and with "the most subtle and sensitive feeling for beauty of form" of any English writer. She speaks glowingly of "the greatness, the fire, the supreme music" of his poems. All this is said before she has reached the twentieth page of her long book—and her ardor increases as she proceeds. Many other literary artists have had as pronounced a view as Dame Edith of her hero, though some have stressed the positive and some the negative side of his work and character. Even in the nineteenth century when his reputation fell so low that Matthew Arnold and others denied that he was a poet at all, he had his defenders. Lamb said he could read him "over and over forever." Thackeray called him "the greatest literary artist...