A scornful optimism, with its confidant onslaughts on our snobbism, will not make material existence a peer for our energy. The gladiator is not a perpetual monument of triumphal health. Napoleon was harried with Elbas. Moments of vision are blurred rapidly and the poet sinks into the rhetoric of the will. But life is invisible and perfection is not in the waves or houses that the poet sees. Beauty is an icy douche of ease and happiness at something suggesting perfect conditions for an organism. A stormy landscape, and a Pigment consisting of a lake of hard, yet florid waves; delight in each brilliant scoop or ragged burst, was John Constable’s beauty. Leonardo’s consisted in a red rain on the shadowed side of heads, and heads of massive female aesthetes. Uccello accumulated pale parallels, and delighted in cold architecture of distinct colour. Korin found in the symmetrical gushing of water, in waves like huge vegetable insects, traced and worked faintly, on a golden pâte, his business. Cézanne liked cumbrous, democratic slabs of life, slightly leaning, transfixed in vegetable intensity. Beauty is an immense predilection, a perfect conviction of the desirability of a certain thing. To a man with long and consumptive fingers a sturdy hand may be heaven. Equilibrium and “perfection” may be a bore to the perfect. The most universally pleasing man is something probably a good way from “perfection”. Henri Fabre was in every way a superior being to Bernard, and he knew of elegant grubs which he would prefer to the painter’s nymphs. It is obvious, though, that we should live a little more in small communities. ---------- [1] [_Editor’s note_: This essay was written as the introduction to a volume of short stories containing “Inn-Keepers and Bestre”, “Unlucky for Pringle” and some others which had appeared in _The English Review_ under Ford Madox Hueffer’s editorship, and in other English periodicals. The book was in process of publication (the author had even been paid an advance on it) when war broke out. The last member of the publishing firm has been killed in France, and the firm disbanded. The essay is complete in itself and need not stand as an “introduction”. It is perhaps the most important single document that Wyndham Lewis has written. Such stories as had not been previously published will appear in later numbers of _The Little Review_.—_E. P._] [2] _Editor’s foot note_: Clarkson, a London theatrical costumer. L’Homme Moyen Sensuel[3] Ezra Pound “I hate a dumpy woman” —_George Gordon, Lord Byron_