[BNP/E3, 31 – 85-86]

Preface to The Mad Fiddler

1st. method of artistic expression: Statement.

2nd. method of artistic expression: Suggestion.

3rd. method of artistic expression: {…}

As the deepest of all feelings is the religious feeling, and the highest of all intellectual activities the philosophical one, it is obvious that the intensest way to feel a sensation or an emotion is to feel it religiously and philosophically. Many people suspect still that Shelley is a pantheist; he is only a man who felt Nature exceedingly, and, every one who feels Nature exceedingly must feel pantheistically. He will only be a pantheist if he takes his sensations seriously, which no sane man does.

The plea for the superiority of our sensations to the central part of our mind is impertinent. It aims at validating the old dogma of the unity of the soul, no longer justifiably possible.

[85v]

The reader of these poems should therefore not take them as expressions of a creed or of a philosophy. They are expressions only of the moments they express. The only thing behind them is their having nothing behind them.

Hysteria made a normal state of our nerves, as the present civilization has persuaded Nature to do, should produce this result.

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This pragmatism (c {…} concept) of religion and philosophy.

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I called this attitude Sensationism in its creative aspect, but, if followed to its spiritual source, it might be called the Higher Paganism.  For as, in the polytheistic system of misunderstanding the world, each thing is eventually endowed with a transcendent personality which is its divine keeper, each river has its Nymph-personality and each tree its humanized-double, so, |in this epitome of {…}|, each sensation has its philosophy and its religion, and each object of sensation its transcendent body. In the sensation-useful terminology of the loses mind occultists (the Harsh-lose type), each object has an “ether double”, which, however, is but the |self-halo of itself|.

[86r]

Convictions are epiphenomena of sensations. A conviction in the usual sense, that is to say, a personing self in subtlety, merely means that the holder of it is incapable of feeling out of one groove. We are all classics in the worst sense. As Pope and Boileau wrote always seemed our theme, as we wrote ever, each of us read our theme, his personality, conceiving it as a fixed thing.

The hysteric liberation of individuality. Each of us – since tells we beginners – is a plurality crucified upon unity. {…} The province of intellect is purely accessory: it does but guide, control and arrange elements emanated from feeling. It cannot produce, it can only act upon produced things.

If this be so, why is this book not more varied? Because it is one book. I hope to cut authors away while it may be sad – and that will be the best praise – that they stand sure to be the same author’s.