Aux Etuves de Wiesbaden

A. D. 1451

Ezra Pound

They entered between two fir trees. A path of irregular flat pentagonal stones led along between shrubbery. Halting by the central court in a sort of narrow gallery, the large tank was below them, and in it some thirty or forty blond nereïds for the most part well-muscled, with smooth flaxen hair and smooth faces—a generic resemblance. A slender brown wench sat at one end listlessly dabbling her feet from the spring-board. Here the water was deeper.

The rest of them, all being clothed in white linen shifts held up by one strap over the shoulder and reaching half way to the knees,—the rest of them waded waist- and breast-deep in the shallower end of the pool, their shifts bellied up by the air, spread out like huge bobbing cauliflowers.

The whole tank was sunken beneath the level of the gardens, and paved and pannelled with marble, a rather cheap marble. To the left of the little gallery, where the strangers had halted, an ample dowager sat in a perfectly circular tub formed rather like the third of an hogshead, behind her a small hemicycle of yew trees kept off any chance draught from the North. She likewise wore a shift of white linen. On a plank before her, reaching from the left to the right side of her tank-hogshead, were a salver with a large piece of raw smoked ham, a few leeks, a tankard of darkish beer, a back-scratcher, the ham-knife.

Before them, from some sheds, there arose a faint steam, the sound of grunts and squeals and an aroma of elderly bodies. From the opposite gallery a white-bearded town-councillor began to throw grapes to the nereïds.

Le Sieur de Maunsier: They have closed these places in Marseilles, causa flegitii, they were thought to be bad for our morals.

Poggio: And are your morals improved?

Maunsier: Nein, bin nicht verbessert.

Poggio: And are the morals of Marseilles any better?

Maunsier: Not that I know of. Assignations are equally frequent; the assignors less cleanly; their health, I presume, none the better. The Church has always been dead set against washing. St. Clement of Alexandria forbade all bathing by women. He made no exception. Baptism and the last oiling were enough, to his thinking. St. Augustine, more genial and human, took a bath to console himself for the death of his mother. I suspect that it was a hot one. Being clean is a pagan virtue, and no part of the light from Judaea.

Poggio: Say rather a Roman, the Greek philosophers died, for the most part, of lice. Only the system of empire, plus a dilettantism in luxuries, could have brought mankind to the wash-tub. The christians have made dirt a matter of morals: a son of God can have no need to be cleansed; a worm begotten in sin and foredoomed to eternal damnation in a bottle of the seven great stenches, would do ill to refine his nostrils and unfit himself for his future. For the elect and the rejected alike, washing is either noxious or useless—they must be transcendent at all costs. The rest of the world must be like them; they therefore look after our morals. Yet this last term is wholly elastic. There is no system which has not been tried, wedlock or unwedlock, a breeding on one mare or on many; all with equal success, with equal flaws, crimes, and discomforts.

Maunsier: I have heard there was no adultery found in Sparta.

Poggio: There was no adultery among the Lacedaemonians because they held all women in common. A rumour of Troy had reached the ears of Lycurgus: “So Lycurgus thought also there were many foolish vain joys and fancies, in the laws and orders of other nations, touching marriage: seeing they caused their bitches and mares to be lined and covered with the fairest dogs and goodliest stallions that might be gotten, praying and paying the maisters and owners of the same: and kept their wives notwithstanding shut up safe under lock and key, for fear lest other than themselves might get them with child, although themselves were sickly, feeble-brained, extreme old.” I think I quote rightly from Plutarch. The girls of Lacedaemon played naked before the young men, that their defects should be remedied rather than hidden. A man first went by stealth to his mistress, and this for a long space of time; thus learning address and silence. For better breeding Lycurgus would not have children the property of any one man, but sought only that they should be born of the lustiest women, begotten of the most vigorous seed.

Maunsier: Christianity would put an end to all that, yet I think there was some trace left in the lex Germanica, and in some of our Provençal love customs; for under the first a woman kept whatever man she liked, so long as she fancied: the children being brought up by her brothers, being a part of the female family, cognati. The chivalric system is smothered with mysticism, and is focussed all upon pleasure, but the habit of older folk-custom is at the base of its freedoms, its debates were on matters of modus.

These girls look very well in their shifts. They confound the precepts of temperance.

Poggio: I have walked and ridden through Europe, annotating, observing. I am interested in food and the animal.

There was, before I left Rome, a black woman for sale in the market. Her breasts stuck out like great funnels, her shoulders were rounded like basins, her biceps was that of a wheel-wright; these upper portions of her, to say nothing of her flattened-in face, were disgusting and hideous but, she had a belly like Venus. From below the breasts to the crotch she was like a splendid Greek fragment. She came of a tropical meat-eating tribe. I observe that gramenivorous and fruit-eating races have shrunken arms and shoulders, narrow backs and weakly distended stomachs. Much beer enlarges the girth in old age, at a time when the form in any case, might have ceased to give pleasure. The men of this nubian tribe were not lovely; they were shaped rather like almonds: the curious roundness in the front aspect, a gradual sloping-in toward the feet, a very great muscular power, a silhouette not unlike that of an egg, or perhaps more like that of a tadpole.

Civilized man grows more frog-like, his members become departmental.

Maunsier: But fixed. Man falls into a set gamut of types. His thoughts also. The informed and the uninformed, the clodhopper and the civilian are equally incapable of trusting an unwonted appearance. Last week I met an exception, and for that cause the matter is now in my mind, and I am, as they say “forming conclusions.” The exception, an Englishman, had found a parochial beauty in Savoia, in the inn of a mountain town, a “local character” as he called her. He could not describe her features with any minute precision, but she wore, he remembered, a dress tied up with innumerable small bits of ribbon in long narrow bow-knots, limp, hanging like grass-blades caught in the middle. She came in to him as a sort of exhibit. He kissed her hand. She sat by his bedside and conversed with him pleasantly. They were quite alone for some time. Nothing more happened. From something in his manner, I am inclined to believe him. He was convinced that nothing more ever did happen.

Poggio: Men have a curious desire for uniformity. Bawdry and religion are all one before it.

Maunsier: They call it the road to salvation.

Poggio: They ruin the shape of life for a dogmatic exterior. What dignity have we over the beasts, save to be once, and to be irreplaceable!

I myself am a rag-bag, a mass of sights and citations, but I will not beat down life for the sake of a model.

Maunsier: Would you be “without an ideal?”

Poggio: Is beauty an ideal like the rest? I confess I see the need of no other. When I read that from the breast of the Princess Hellene there was cast a cup of “white gold,” the sculptor finding no better model; and that this cup was long shown in the temple at Lyndos, which is in the island of Rhodes; or when I read, as I think is the textual order, first of the cup and then of its origin, there comes upon me a discontent with human imperfection. I am no longer left in the “slough of the senses,” but am full of heroic life, for the instant. The sap mounts in the twigs of my being.

The visions of the mystics give them like courage, it may be.

Maunsier: My poor uncle, he will talk of the slough of the senses and the “loathsome pit of contentment.” His “ideas” are with other men’s conduct. He seeks to set bounds to their actions.

I cannot make out the mystics; nor how far we may trust to our senses, and how far to sudden sights that come from within us, or at least seem to spring up within us: a mirage, an elf-music; and how far we are prey to the written word.

Poggio: I have seen many women in dreams, surpassing most mortal women, but I doubt if I have on their account been stirred to more thoughts of beauty, than I have had meditating upon that passage in latin, concerning the temple of Pallas at Lyndos and its memorial cup of white gold. I do not count myself among Plato’s disciples.

Maunsier: And yet it is forced upon us that all these things breed their fanatics; that even a style might become a religion and breed bigots as many, and pestilent.

Poggio: Our blessing is to live in an age when some can hold a fair balance. It can not last; many are half-drunk with freedom; a greed for taxes at Rome will raise up envy, a cultivated court will disappear in the ensuing reaction. We are fortunate to live in the wink, the eye of mankind is open; for an instant, hardly more than an instant. Men are prized for being unique. I do not mean merely fantastic. That is to say there are a few of us who can prize a man for thinking, in himself, rather than for a passion to make others think with him.

Perhaps you are right about style; an established style could be as much a nuisance as any other establishment. Yet there must be a reputable normal. Tacitus is too crabbed. The rhetoricians ruined the empire. Let us go on to our baths.

Finis