The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [137]
The prince that Pound found within, we must note, was one who loved poetry. “And Kung said …,” a Canto tells us, “‘When the prince has gathered about him / All the savants and artists, his riches will be fully employed.’” There was nothing in either history or politics that attracted Pound more than a ruler who liked art. He loved a “boss” who’d been to the mysteries, from Odysseus down to the Renaissance rulers (Malatesta, the Estes, the Medicis), from Jefferson—who first appears in Canto 21 with a letter asking a friend to find him a gardener who plays the French horn—to Napoleon, who gets a bow in Canto 43 for supposedly having said:
“Artists high rank, in fact sole social summits
which the tempest of politics can not reach.”
And from Napoleon to Mussolini: “The Duce and Kung Fu Tseu equally perceive that their people need poetry …”
But these are not just strong men. With the exception of Jefferson, they are also bullies. One cannot talk of these “princes” without talking of their overweening will. In the Odyssey Odysseus is plagued not by Trojans, after all, but by sleep, forgetfulness, animals, reveries, and women. He deals with these through violence, power, cunning, lies, seduction, and bravado. He whips his men who want to stay with the lotus-eaters; he takes Circe to bed at the point of a sword. When he gets home, he begins to put his affairs in order by murdering all the servant girls who’ve been sleeping with the suitors. He’s the Mussolini of the ancient world.
To give Pound his due, we must add that although his heroes are men of the developed will, he goes to some lengths to distinguish goodwill from bad. When he tells us that “the greater the artist the more permanent his creations, and this is a matter of WILL,” he does add that “it is also a matter of the DIRECTION OF THE WILL …” Goodwill lifts us up and bad will pulls us down. And Pound took his heroes to be men of goodwill. “Perhaps,” remarks Emery, “it does not oversimplify to say that [in the Cantos] good and evil are a matter of directio voluntatis, with money-power … representing the most powerful leverage for evil will.”
The problem with this dichotomy is that it omits another form of evil: the use of the will when the will is of no use. Such evil is usually invisible to a willful man. Goodwill can fight bad will, but only in those cases where will is called for in the first place. At times when the will should be suspended, whether it is good or bad is irrelevant. Or to put it more strongly: at such times all will, no matter its direction, is bad will. For when the will dominates, there is no gap through which grace may enter, no break in the ordered stride for error to escape, no way by which a barren prince may receive the virtù of his people, and for an artist, no moment of receptiveness when the engendering images may come forward.
Any artist who develops the will risks its hegemony. If he is at all wary of that sympathy by which we become receptive to things beyond the self, he may not encourage the will to abandon its position when its powers are exhausted. Willpower has a tendency to usurp the functions of imagination, particularly in a man in a patriarchy. Yeats’s shopworn formula—that “rhetoric is the will doing the work of the imagination”—refers to such a state, for when the will works in isolation, it turns of necessity to dictionary studies, syntactical tricks, intellectual formulae, memory, history, and convention—any source of material, that is, which can imitate the fruits of imagination without actually allowing them to emerge. Just as there are limits to the power of the erotic, so there are limits to the power of the will. The will knows about survival and endurance; it can direct attention and energy; it can finish things. But we cannot remember a tune or a dream on willpower. We cannot stay awake on willpower. Will may direct virtù but it cannot bring it into the world. The will