But a belief in the fundamental obviousness or absoluteness of ‘things’ is inconsistent with a belief in an eccentricity in things which the artist is supposed to reveal: and a belief in the fundamental obviousness or ordinariness of a mass humanity, adhering personally to the same absolute to which ‘things’ adhere, is inconsistent with a belief in the creative originality which is to reveal the eccentricity latent in obviousness to this mass humanity equipped only to seize the obvious. The only possible way for creative originality to be consistent with mass humanity is by some mystical process in which the artist is chosen as the inspired instrument of mass-ordinariness to reveal ‘things’ which he sees as no one else sees because everything is so obvious and everyone so ordinary that one does not ordinarily ‘see’ the obviousness and ordinariness unless one is possessed of creative originality. While such a philosophical tangle was forcing modernist poets into an unwitting romanticism, Gertrude Stein went on--and kept going on for twenty years--quietly, patiently and successfully practising an authentic barbarism; quite by herself and without encouragement. Her only fault, from the practical point of view, was that she took primitiveness too literally, so literally that she made herself incomprehensible to the exponents of primitivism--to everyone for that matter. She exercised perfect discipline over her creative faculties and she was able to do this because she was completely without originality. Everybody being unable to understand her thought that this was because she was too original or was trying hard to be original. But she was only divinely inspired in ordinariness: her creative originality, that is, was original only because it was so grossly, so humanly, all-inclusively ordinary. She used language automatically to record pure ultimate obviousness. She made it capable of direct communication not by caricaturing contemporary language--attacking decadence with decadence--but by purging it completely of its false experiences. None of the words Miss Stein uses ever had experience. They are no older than the use she makes of them, and she has been herself no older than her age conceived barbarically. Put it there in there where they have it Put it there in there there and they halve it Put it there in there there and they have it Put it there in there there and they halve it These words have had no history, and the design that Miss Stein has made of them is literally ‘abstract’ and mathematical because they are commonplace words without any hidden etymology; they are mechanical and not eccentric. If they possess originality it is that of mass-automatism. Miss Stein in her _Composition as Explanation_ has written: Nothing changes from generation to generation except the thing seen, and that makes a composition.