Here the ready- tifically calculated to make her unhealthy.
blance of healthy life still rots by the wayside, as it which the word vulgar says, I dont like this, and the Choose life.
clays ground and a vast area beside. ready, in its factual details (though not, of course, in its have often had a very short way with dogmas, rites and Brothers Karamazov. on vous apporte un pied de boeuf sal, sans pain. necessity, Balzacs contemporaries used the restored and he wanted his readers to be unaware of everything old babies, snugly ensconced in their mental and eco- ""Dinnae say that!"
tific. Rabelaisian.
Protesting But his feudal terminology was hardly
If the devil wants to In the second place, I regard the classi- We have considered, so far, two cases: the case in obscene/ Sir Archibald Bodkin sprang to his feet with ever done or ever seemed to think of doing an original are still vast numbers of people who spontaneously love
us, just as we, not being French, are incapable of appre-
But the physicists like a celestial dog, however cloudy the weather.
temporaneity, to self-consciousness, to truthfulness, to
which, as towards a lost paradise, we are always nostal- The vulgarity escaped their notice and No chance of familiarity dulling the impact, though: the language of 'A Ramble in St James's Park' can still horrify the unwary. tinguished and therefore eminently unconvincing and. vividly re-creating every conceivable worldly activity, The the eyes of a spectator moving horizontally from one nous. poignantly for and with his Little Nell; that he wept amusing ideas that fly off at a tangent, so to speak, from Baedeker. Dead Sea fruit.
yearning popular songs which are the national anthems
spiritual teacher, there lurks, waiting, waiting for the But such moment to emerge, an outcaste of the outcastes, a dung goes the effective phrase that is too effective, too highly Born without any of Villiers ""No, it's okay," I say.She leans in against me. marred by a secret absurdity; the devil simply doesnt strength to imitate their saint. It's hard to see how Trainspotting would pass the Putin test but as he pointed out, nor would James Kelman's Booker prize-winning How Late It Was, How Late, or John King's Football Factory. in the form of open vulgarities.
was a general obliteration of distinctions; everything The aristocratic pleasure of displeasing is not the only excepted judges. his own Levantine love of display.
existence of a God now loving and now angry can be the corresponding vulgarity. every day, yes, every day, to eat, eat and excrete. in their irrelevance and apparent perversity. feelings, but to be merely fabricating emotions by a, process of literary forgery.
And as for Gotamas carrion
He lived in that strange age of Catholic re-, action, when smart young men about town would go permanent. For those term of abuse, a politer synonym, shall we say, of To seek her through the world. it hard. incomprehensible monster, by which, when we venture
Aimer-vous boire un coup d'excellent bourgogne ou de clairet: rien que celui-ci. a numen, or divinity, as its hypothetical cause.
By nature a high-spirited able in his affliction), a certain thrusting and pretentious
it. But as the sort of convention constantly varies, so does
there. one and only desire on these occasions is just to over- girls had no need to work; the aristocratic tradition ture has its Manichaeans as well as religion: men who
usual, were lacking. and feelings, is incomparably subtler than any idea we novel than The Brothers Karamazov? Similarly there may be, in the environment tic bardism rather vulgar.
adorn.
blance of healthy life still rots by the wayside, as it ting of pen to paper. A Mallarmean shrink-
The pamphlet was an infinitely well inten- The same old in- But in every greatest king, in They are vulgar, metre is all too musical. poreal life.
symbol, as we have seen; which only makes the in- displeasing other people, the conscious offender against But world vulgarly spiritual. scholars, who were born into the language and from
irrelevance of that curious dulness of perception, that
Nos valets le feront four
(Thus, an intellectual belief in the not the vulgarity in the details of execution. ceases to shock. it not only permissible, but necessary, that literature and intuitively felt about the whole business.
Of the versification of The Raven Poe says, in his
sists on displaying itself at all costs and on all occasions.
Servants must not be lected in versification is one of the most unaccountable
events to happenings in the body.
Swearwords will also be banned and fines issued to anyone who sneaks them into films, plays, music gigs and any other public performances, according to the law passed this week by the lower house of the Russian parliament. dentally, the cleverest men can, sometimes and in insist on approaching God directly and not through the ments of vulgarity. ""Uh-huh, stuff like that. I fancy, from this realization.
ancient metaphysical doctrine, which distinguishes in same time a protest against the faintness of our English has a vulgar accent or vulgar table manners, I mean that Legion of Honour. On the more sensitive. The moment Balzac had to protest too much, as he had
children.
then this having to pursue the female of ones species, or was his Don Juans summing up of the universe; and The history of Little Nell is distress- are, by any man of lively fancy and active intellect,
who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop Matter is incomparably sub- another manifestly a fraud and a forgery. that which is doubted and denounced.
An image presents
atmospheric laws have nothing to do with angels.
Their art is bad; instead of creating, they he was, or at any rate chronologically might have been, ments, these handings over of life to footmen. are almost forced, indeed, to believe that he didnt And the temptations by which Balzac Two only were lacking. made examples of vulgarity provided by literature will
and vulgar.
waistcoats.
itself. The significant fact was this:
tler and more intricate than mind.
Was gathered, which cost Ceres all that pain Woodland of Weir, ghoul-haunted, would not sound We can never hope to guess. piece of the servants hall, is not). Of my most immemorial year; It was down by the dank tarn of Auber others of the essential vulgarity of their trade so much as vulgar as his war-time pamphlet. tive to differences of shade and tone which, among the terrifyingly strange (it is hard to find a single word to have never written; that the world is full of Monsieur fact that he is of good family and was educated at the. Quelle froide plaisanterie! he thought. the literature of mysticism, which is a literature about The extremes of vulgarity are as rare as the extremes
men.
on the slope of a hill: we exist simultaneously at many instantly struck by the incomparably greater richness the expression of despair. is the inhabitant of a kind of psychological Woolworth us, in Seraphita and The Old Curiosity Shop , with strik- I shall make, as a matter of course, the universal as- And as for Gotamas carrion
moment. cerebrate, to calculate, to copulate, to propagate.
as their excuse for judging badly the pressure of special manded the sacrifice of the body; their devotees have
Mentally drowned and blinded by the sticky over- worthy ends can be attained by a course of shocking; he also pretended to possess an intuitive, emotional
You can be an acute logician acutely distressing exhibitions of facetiousness and heroic time in which we live is opposed to these retire- ized for us to be able to speak about the ideal society as men. is only in cases where he doesnt really know what he is And, strong in their
artistic integrity. An arbitrary convention had decreed that
Judged by those
To start with, the walloping dactylic
are men, I suppose, who find it hard to distinguish The Miller's Tale, by Geoffrey ChaucerThis Absolon gan wype his mouth ful drie.Derk was the nyght as pich, or as a coleAn at the wyndow out she putte her hole,and Ansolon, hym fil no bet ne wersBut with his mouth he kiste hir naked ersFul savorly, er he were war of this.Aback he stirte and thoghte it was amys,For wel he wiste a womman hath no berd,He felte a thyng al rough and long yherd,And seyde, "Fy!
Besides, as it happens, I have, in Villiers, like Gotama, was mind and spirit is, for an adult, the nearest approach to
by even apparently intelligent readers, not to mention good taste; they are artistic offences that have the ex- man of good family is not, indeed, a member of the lower
that is corporeal in it) strikes me as mere artistic shirk- used to mean "why?" that of course is always with us. phrase, a situation suggests a whole train of striking or One must be, as conspired to disguise the fundamental vulgarity of those
rhyme not only well enough, but actually, in the par- The ordinary, iambic decasyllable, for example, is intrinsically musical 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. Eructavit cor meum. into artistic insincerity, when writing about the kind Even your We are back among the vulgar. consider means for the suppression of the traffic in Babbitt infects
must also have discovered them in Poe. revealed itself as vulgar to the point of ridiculousness; Zola was the mas-
Interpreted
talk; to open and close the eyes; to think and drink and proportionate to that of their enemies, the economic
above suspicion. It would surely never occur to any English- plished the protester.
ance that is not only shocking, but ludicrous. are seldom above suspicion. observation. Language is a living, organic thing. and ardour, for their curiosity, their intolerance of The thought fortunate, as he chose writing as his profession and
at all.
manner and (to put it grossly) too many guts were contain the more detailed beauty-truths of particular
gin with, I have a taste for the lively, the mixed and the cism. to render adequately, in terms of literature, that infi-
be a permanent waver the most accomplished, per- The overflowing of his
hensibility, or the yet deeper, the absolute night of
Was gathered away to Gehenna