Ideational Evolution: Wilson, Gladstone & Disraeli

“--- … Do you believe in your own theory?   --- No, Stephen said promptly.”     - James Joyce, Ulysses.   Urbane, to comfort them, the neophyte blogger purred: -- And we have, have we not, those priceless pages of Ezra Pound in The Dial from June 1922, reviewing the then-new novel Ulysses by James Joyce?   A great poet on a great brother poet. -- um, what? Am I not supposed to recognize that that opening mangles the first words of Joyce’s great episode “Scylla and Charybdis” from Ulysses, in an attempt to paraphrase it? -- No, I was hoping it would be painfully obvious. -- That’s a strange way to celebrate Bloomsday. -- Meh, Bloomsday was yesterday. This is June 17 already. Back to my point. I am contemplating the words of Ezra Pound on Joyce in 1922, in which he suggests that having writers as precise with words as Joyce before Woodrow Wilson died in 1921 might have saved “America and Europe” from Wilson. In fact, he implies, from the writing of...

“It was absurd, it was impossible. One could not say what one meant. So now she laid her brushes neatly in the box, side by side, and said to William Bankes: 'It suddenly gets cold. The sun seems to give less heat,’ she said.” -   Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse. The difficulty of interpersonal communication at the turn of the century was a common subject for British literature in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. From Will and Dorothea in George Eliot’s Middlemarch , who drown in longing while unable to express their true feelings, to EM Forster, whose motto “Only Connect” underscored the extent to which his characters could never quite get on the same page. By the time World War I started, all Europe may have been sick from this communicative illness. A case can even be made that the war began and worsened because of this difficulty, which must have infected the network of literal royal cousins who ruled the whole continent when the archduke of Austria was suddenly murder...