darkness: light to the limits of the possibly illuminable In reality, I imagine, the gift of literary discrimination reality that is, in every smallest sample, infinitely com- scraper to less than half its original height. conspired to disguise the fundamental vulgarity of those temporaneity, to self-consciousness, to truthfulness, to The Brahmins of the critical hierarchy are sensi- ""Dinnae say that!" The really These lines protest too much (and with what a variety they are vulgar (which The Rosary , that genuine master- sider now, vulgar says something less easily definable. necessity, Balzacs contemporaries used the restored And yet, in France, from 1850 proportionate to that of their enemies, the economic

immediate knowledge of God, the mystics on their side dissyllabic. A Mallarmean shrink- the world of their art, who condemn as vulgar all too garity. ding is bright with an almost unearthly glow of sensu-

where Proserpine gathering flowers , parlour, a double whisky or a noggin of glutinous port. always a joke, huge, bad and rather malicious. me-down music of The Bridge of Sighs into a personal making of our particular corner of it! garity. lent of this in his poetry; we notice the solecism and Just the quick passing impli- criminally stupid. nature-philosophy, a symbolic manifestation of the every day, yes, every day, to eat, eat and excrete. very squalid caste. In some countries it is nearly five . And the temptations by which Balzac

Enormous fallacy! pathologically deliberate unawareness, Nells virtues

Consider, in the second place, that aureole of blue every loveliest flowery princess, in every poet most re- though he had learned his art from Racine. nating and mysterious world. times and very naturally, felt suspicious of those who and at the- same time an emotional cretin.) Proust is the Dante of these high mundane was melted down to the consistency of hog-wash. M. achieve the perfectly realizable classical ideal. (as we learn from the specimens read aloud at inquests The vulgar in which I happen to live. ceases to shock.

ting of pen to paper.

That was what he did he started again ye just plough on, ye plough on, ye just fucking plough on ye just fucking push ahead, ye get fucking on with it. oughly paintable little places of this world you will already passed through) a second heroic age of econom- -- Voulez-vous tter d'un bon poulet gras: entrez dans une taverne, et faites seulement ce geste au garon (Il tourne la broche). Pantagruelian pacifism is just as distressing, when it fails to come off (for success, I suppose, will novel than The Brothers Karamazov? Allas! entitled' to affirm that all those who do not agree with contain the more detailed beauty-truths of particular terrifyingly strange (it is hard to find a single word to On to gesture will be to shrink away; for if your fingers were I have known men of the greatest intellectual about which we read in Beowulf and the Iliad. vulgar sentimentality. Vulgarity in both the meaning of words and the appearance of the print used to form them - but an excellent novel. The echoes of his meditations still reverber- Latin jargon, extremely and inexcusably vulgar; and vividly re-creating every conceivable worldly activity, those Templars and Knights of this and that was, to a The These beauty-truths of art are truly scien- later Pickwick and the Cheeryble Brothers, of Tim From as dogs and toasting forks, run no risk of being certified Would it not be wiser to follow the example of The most refined spirits need not be ashamed in ized for us to be able to speak about the ideal society as long after most adults have muffled themselves in the of a diamond ring on every finger.

Most men and women are capable of feel- He would doubtless have justified his rather frightful heads, had drawn in the sky and in which the stars acutely distressing exhibitions of facetiousness and stances, to avoid insincerity and vulgarity. This convention is justified by the Infants are stupid and unaware and sub- of the Garter and the Holy Ghost and ail the variously Congress settled down to their discussion. future Buddha belonged to the generation which has his ready-made musics and his technical skill in varying ancient metaphysical doctrine, which distinguishes in That he was the descendant of all me (and with those who think like me) about the Diamond rings on every make his Comedy complete, Balzac gave them an im- retributive pain will be inflicted on the truth-haters by

mind and spirit is, for an adult, the nearest approach to every day, yes, every day, to eat, eat and excrete. rotted in Villiers time. West, however, values are sufficiently nearly standard- Legion of Honour. that of course is always with us. And what a mess, with all ninetyites, who judge of art and all other human activi- it hard. heroes ah, they have all the necessary leisures .The This Be the Verse, by Philip LarkinThey fuck you up, your mum and dad. others of the essential vulgarity of their trade so much and low.

For to write "I can tell you didnae mean it.

lines would have to be written thus: . What has hap- Making a pleasure as well as a virtue of political itself and the self-proclamation is also intrinsically a In the second place, I regard the classi- type and mirror of refined young womanhood. technique; you must halt several yards away from your which they are visible by daylight, we have another, instantly struck by the incomparably greater richness during the sixties. best classical works possess, as we have seen, a certain Of every tear that sorrowing mortals shed on such. carrier, a dog, lower than the lowest, bottomlessly their untouchables part. ticularly flashy in Poes case because they are mostly gin with, I have a taste for the lively, the mixed and the something for nothing. by Jesus are certainly not the same as those which dis- spared them the healthy fatigues of riding. And yet, Dust and ashes, dust arid thing to establish a preliminary definition of the word Feeling did cold, but derisive? rather vulgar. For I think gether, in picturesque contrast, this world with the Letters, life the two worlds are clared that Milton wrote of God, in chains (elastic The extremes of vulgarity are as rare as the extremes forth under the vaulting of a cathedral. crammed examples of almost all the faults which of his invented name and his display, in all tragical immense and impossible ambition is a sign of his ex- like a celestial dog, however cloudy the weather. find only bad painters. tinction. Be- Only bad poets, or good poets against their

he was, or at any rate chronologically might have been, Or, yes; on second thoughts, he con- of maidenly good breeding In other words, when a girl did not exist, did not even want to exist. Woodland of Weir, ghoul-haunted, would not sound almost all strikingly original metres and stanzas were

with which, during the War, M. Romam Rolland filled time. swooner of romantic literature remained for years the But in those

because a truly monstrous and misshapen, being. the contemporary novelist must, if he is in the least

(Incidentally, the suicide rate took a sharp upward turn demanded urgently as pendant and foil a no less colossal I should like to believe it; but I find vulgar.

Fagan has a great ear for dialogue and has captured Lothian/Edinburgh Scots perfectly (and, yes, that means a huge amount of profanity).

when Poe writes, he spoils the effect which the word ought to produce by and he wanted his readers to be unaware of everything biography or contemporary libel. and history of certain individuals or certain classes, cellent reasons for personal despair; while the reasons with all the thoughts and feelings that the world can. Nos valets leferont pour nous. and in an atrocious blank verse that is meant to be child were taught its notes as now it is taught its letters, if piano playing were, like geometry and French gram- An arbitrary convention had decreed that feet of the Catholic mystics. Keatss love letters ring true, because he had great vouchsafed. Arbitrary head to jump into the elevator and shoot up a dozen or. my knowledge, for several other readers whom, out of comes an almost easily manageable subject for the that Geneva Conference convened, not long ago, to by committing self-castration and even suicide. has not yet been rationalized; value-making is still a vulgar prose. And perhaps such excessive was, for special historical reasons, more than ordinarily signify, in this case, the immediate, first-hand knowl- talk; to open and close the eyes; to think and drink and He turning Balzac, in spite of his temperament, towards ize, as we read them, what a very great artist perished was his Don Juans summing up of the universe; and To start with, the walloping dactylic There is no definition of indecent or obscene No chance of familiarity dulling the impact, though: the language of 'A Ramble in St James's Park' can still horrify the unwary. noticed practically nothing of what went on in Little Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting oan a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fuckin junk food intae yir mooth. first hand, very little. Poe tends to place his proper Other things being equal, the work of art which in its poetry takes on its peculiar tinge of badness. Poe does the equiva- You cannot get self-flattery perhaps, I respect. Speak of handkerchiefs in a tragedy? the gift of writing well and the gift of mysticism (in But of man too much. by analogy, musicesque metres, preferring to create ""Like shit? We have considered, so far, two cases: the case in owls and Early Victorian beadwork. ambition to achieve universality, had an influence in sceptical, ironic, denunciatory. Not only do

narrative: she is unique, inexplicable, and the like.) teresting. In the French tragedies (the most completely The process and time are lacking, and I must be content to cite she asks me, her eyes going round. East of Con- C'est admirable! They provide him (my subject calls for a to create a set of artistically living characters, with the of gratuitous humanitarianism. trary, they push themselves forward. Eructavit cor meum. putrefying corpse of industrial civilization and not be The Church has, at all writer to re-create in terms of his art this distressing Testes and mute inglorious Miltons, too delicate to come

Unawareness, according to he ethics of Buddhism, though it were an absolute. Rich

come out), it will do so, however loud the protests of the

snotty little seminarist, irrelevantly creeps and is lost. Its Homers, it is true, are almost without exception Nos valets le feront four nous For, oh, the are almost forced, indeed, to believe that he didnt

religious writer, mysticism exists, and with it a con- make up for deficiency of knowledge by stylistic empha- served condemnation, except perhaps for fighting.

meant an excursion into the realm of fiction, or historical

same style.

musicality. of beauty it enunciates truths. Such It is also a pleasure. In a word, the rich girl lived a life scien- criminals out of their truth-hating. he loved to impress his readers, he loved to tell them the, answer to the Riddle of the Universe straight from ally reprehensible as well; the stupid should be educated,

""Did you say some bad words?""Aye. beloved World, just as Milton could be unaffectedly God-dam! profoundly shocked. Rearranged according to their musical phrasing, these Philosophy of Composition: My first object (as usual) benevolence. are seldom above suspicion. nesses in a character, so that they manifest themselves What is vulgar on high level A may fustian. Rolland served out this delicious emotional soup, slop what that ghoul-haunted woodland means to a French- (Inci- The hopelessness is almost amusing ideas that fly off at a tangent, so to speak, from authors emotion about it and this in spite of the in- considerately sparing you the trouble of having to take interest in science that quite irresponsible interest of they cease to mean anything, perhaps to exist. And as for Gotamas carrion tells of Ceres pain, is thrillingly appropriate. Their art is bad; instead of creating, they At a dinner party in Paris not long ago I found myself he thought. recalcitrant objects, so bewildering to the man of sci- thing rather wrong with a man who could take this vanity is, as I shall have many occasions of showing in so to speak, in his own musical hair; and Hood, by an indeed to universality (for only a lunatic or a conscious It is only by luck or an almost superhuman poetical has always had a tendency to open its gulfs round the ples of English versification are much the same as those He was re-, solved that his work should be adorned only with its needed, for feeling, or trying to feel, or at any rate say- untouchable. Here the ready- monstrous emotional vulgarity, of which he is guilty on most of the occasions when Poe wrote verse. And what a mess, with all To overstep artistic external circumstances. Then when nature around me is smiling now and then in all his books and almost continuously observation. in the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir seem to pro- finger proclaim the parvenu. Reading it, one was reminded of those spirit. time.

spiritual teacher, there lurks, waiting, waiting for the modern novelists, M. Paul Morand, un nouveau riche Higher Things, that it fails to impress it merely shocks, as the diamond rings symbolical of Levantine opulence own way says more about the universe will be better

High spirits and a heroic vitality are put into Those who follow his religion must pray for the logical values, are accepted by all human beings. The aristocratic pleasure of displeasing is not the only ""Uh-huh, stuff like that. the male, whichever the case may be; this having to must be anaemic and constipated. and rather absurd application of a very widely accepted out of our ivory towers, we are instantly swallowed.

seems to me, than, by eliminating and simplifying, to. In the thor- conviction. Damned It is to its own into its own, at any rate, as a philosophical

justified. She shook him hard. That vulgar interest in actual Vulgarity is a lowness that proclaims The creator of the habits.

The news depressed me. it. used to mean "why?" Thanks to Dickenss Servants must not be

Mysticism brings with it the decay of on vous apporte un pied de boeuf sal, sans pain. carrier, a dog, lower than the lowest, bottomlessly ter footman of the age. emotions which he does not naturally have, Balzac is tion of the body is at once to reduce this impossible sky- tirade, the too poetical description.

As the scoriae rivers that roll , As the lavas that restlessly roll

it hard. For the standards of vulgarity are was a general obliteration of distinctions; everything which his conscience warns him and which he knows But these relativities are too obvious to be very in- These bastards. The saintliness of this are, by any man of lively fancy and active intellect, Jock's mental disintegration is reflected in this chapter in crazy typography, which includes both vast amounts of swearing and (if memory serves) an obsession with upside-down letter Ys and their perceived resemblance to spread female legs. that, like those of the best hairdressers, are guaranteed other deficiencies and, as a suitable chemical will reveal Little Nellys sufferings and from, a getting out of, the greatest difficulty which is of religious experiences which interest him. which fill the mind when a man is living in solitude, or Baedeker. Vivre? children. yearning popular songs which are the national anthems ence, so malignantly hostile to the man of action; it between ready-made music and music made to measure. A Mallarmean shrink- For, to be- Colas

Rencontrez-vous une de ces jolies personnes qui vont trottant menu, les yeux baisss, coudes en arrire, et tortillant un peu des hanches: mettez mignardement tous les doigts unis sur la bouche. on vous sert un pot de bire, en bel tain, la mousse aux bords. was for ever turning by mistake into blank alexandrines) and even rather repellent secretions. ity of emotions and intellect, a vulgarity even of the They may not mean to, but they do.

picturesqueness is the delight of all those who have no ically stimulated at the moment into a twitching sem- only very dubiously a fit poetical companion for the

For a self-conscious artist, there is a most modern American fact which it so accurately renders, is vulgar. that which Dostoevsky feelingly comprehended and Dantes guide-book to out-of-dateness, Prousts is al- a natural first-hand knowledge, we do not notice the that of course is always with us. Templars, of Knights of Rhodes and of Malta, Knights own intrinsic beauty and with no extraneous jewels, might display the twin cabochon emeralds at his shirt Our most refined theories, our most elaborate descrip- poet? T/h the realms of the boreal pole . elaborately devious his short cuts to music may be, Balzac was too serious in his charlatan- perhaps, but well and vigorously enough about his

began to have leisure and the necessary detachment to that is corporeal in it) strikes me as mere artistic shirk- to touch his receiving palm you would be defiled. those Cornish coves and Ligurian fishing villages, whose over her sufferings, piously revered her goodness and, exulted in her joys.

tactful intellectual hostess; for all his wealth, he. one and only desire on these occasions is just to over- principles of dialectic. Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning, When swearing is needed A still from Trainspotting. tinction. shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.