Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot

by Frank Kermode

  power exer�;ises itself in criticism instead. These minds often find

  in Hamlet a vicarious existence for their own artistic realization.

  Sucil a mind had Goethe, who made of Hamlet a Werther ; and

  such had Coleridge, who made of Hamlet a Coleridge ; and probably neither of these men in writing about Hamlet remembered that his first business was to study a work of art. The kind of

  criticism that Goethe and Coleridge produced, in writing of

  Hamlet, is the most misleading kind possible. For they both

  possessed unquestionable critical insight, and both make their

  critical aberrations the more plausible by the substitution - of

  their own Hamlet for Shakespeare's - which their creative gift

  effects. We should be thankful that Walter Pater did not fix his

  attention on this play.

  Two writers of our time, Mr. J. M. Robertson and Professor

  Stoll of the University of Minnesota, have issued small books

  which can be praised for moving in the other direction. Mr. Stoll

  performs a service in recalling to our attention the labours of the

  critics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 1 observing that

  they knew less about psychology than more recent Hamlet critics, hut

  they were nearer in spirit to Shakespeare's art ; and as they insisted on

  the importance of the effect of the whole rather than on the importance

  of the leading character, they were nearer, in their old-fashioned way,

  to the secret of dramatic art in general.

  f2!ta work of art, the work of art cannot be interpreted ; there is

  nothing to interpret ; we can only criticize it according to standards, in comparison to other works of art ; and for 'interpretation'

  1 I have never, by the way, seen a cogent refutation of Thomas

  Ry mer's objections to Othello.

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  ESSAYS OF GENER A L I ZA T I O N

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  the chief task i s the presentation of relevant historical facts which

  the reader is not assumed to know. Mr. Robertson points out, very

  pertinently, how critics have failed in their 'interpretation' of

  Hamlet by ignoring what ought to be very obvious : that Hamlet

  is a stratification, that it represents the efforts of a series of men,

  each making what he could out of the work of his predecessors.

  The Hamlet of Shakespeare will appear to us very differently

  if, instead of treating the whole action of the play as due to

  Shakespeare's design, we perceive his Hamlet to be superposed

  upon much cruder material which persists even in the final

  form.

  We know that there was an older play by Thomas Kyd, that

  extraordinary dramatic (if not poetic) genius who was in all probability the author of two plays so dissimilar as the Spanish Tragedy and Arden of Feversham ; and what this play was like we

  can guess from three clues : from the Spanish Tragedy itself, from

  the tale of Belleforest upon which Kyd's Hamlet must have been

  based, and from a version acted in Germany in Shakespeare's

  lifetime which bears strong evidence of having been adapted from

  the earlier, not from the later, play. From these three sources it is

  clear that in the earlier play the motive was a revenge motive

  simply ; that the action or delay is caused, as in the Spanish

  Tragedy, solely by the difficulty of assassinating a monarch surrounded by guards ; and that the 'madness' of Hamlet was feigned in order to escape suspicion, and successfully. In the final

  play of Shakespeare, on the other hand, there is a motive which

  is more important than that of revenge, and which explicitly

  'blunts' the latter ; the delay in revenge is unexplained on grounds

  of necessity or expediency ; and the effect of the 'madness' is not

  to lull but to arouse the king's suspicion. The alteration is not

  complete enough, however, to be convincing. Furthermore, there

  are verbal parallels so close to the Span ish Tragedy as to leave no

  doubt that in places Shakespeare was merely revising the text of

  Kyd. And finally there are unexplained scenes - the Polonius­

  Laertes and the Polonius-Reynaldo scenes - for which there is

  little excuse ; these scenes are not in the verse style of Kyd, and

  not beyond doubt in the style of Shakespeare. These Mr.

  Robertson believes to be scenes in the original play of Kyd reworked by a third hand, perhaps Chapman, before Shakespeare touched the play. And he concludes, with very strong show of

  reason, that the original play of Kyd was, like certain other

  revenge plays, in two parts of five acts each. The upshot of Mr.

  Robertson's examination is, we believe, irrefragable : that

  Shakespeare's Hamlet, so far as it is Shakespeare's, is a play

  dealing with the effect of a mother's guilt upon her son, and that

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  HAMLET

  Shakespeare was unable to impose this motive successfully upon

  the 'intractable' material of the old play.

  Of the intractability there can be no doubt. So far from being

  Shakespeare's masterpiece, the play is most certainly an artistic

  failure. In several ways the play is puzzling, and disquieting as is

  none of the others. Of all the plays it is the longest and is possibly

  the one on which Shakespeare spent most pains ; and yet he has

  left in it superfluous and inconsistent scenes which even hasty

  revision should have noticed. The versification is variable. Lines

  like

  Look, the morn, in russet mantle clad,

  Walks o'er the dew of yon high east em hill,

  are of the Shakespeare of Romeo and Juliet. The lines in Act V.

  Sc. ii,

  Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting

  That would not let me sleep . . .

  Up from my cabin,

  My sea-gown scarf'd about me, in the dark

  Grop'd I to find out them: had my desire;

  Finger'd their packet;

  are of his quite mature. Both workmanship and thought are in an

  unstable position. We are surely justified in attributing the play,

  with that other profoundly interesting play of 'intractable'

  material and astonishing versification, Measure for Measure, to a

  period of crisis, after which follow the tragic successes which

  culminate in Coriolanus. Coriolanus may be not as 'interesting' as

  Hamlet, but it is, with Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare's most

  assured artistic success. And probably more people have thought

  Hamlet a work of art because they found it interesting, than have

  found it interesting because it is a work of art. It is the 'Mona

  Lisa' of literature.

  The grounds of Hamlet's failure are not immediately obvious.

  Mr. Robertson is undoubtedly correct in concluding that the

  essential emotion of the play is the feeling of a son towards a

  guilty mother :

  [Hamlet's] tone is that of one who has suffered tortures on the score

  of his mother's degradation . . . . The guilt of a mother is an almost

  intolerable motive for drama, but it had to be maintained and emphasized to supply a psychological solution, or rather a hint of one.

  This, however, is by no means the whole story. It is not merely

  the 'guilt of a mother' that cannot be handled as Shakespeare

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  ESSAYS OF GENERAL1 Z A T I ON

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  handled the suspicion of Othello, the infatuation of Antony, or

  the pride of Coriolanus. The subject might conceivably have

  expanded into a tragedy like these, intelligible, self-complete, in

  the sunlight. Hamlet, like the sonnets, is full of some stuff that

  the writer could not drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate

  into art. And when we search for this feeling, we find it, as in the

  sonnets, very difficult to localize. You cannot point to it in the

  speeches ; indeed, if you examine the two famous soliloquies you

  see the versification of Shakespeare, but a content which might be

  claimed by another, perhaps by the author of the Revenge of

  Bussy d'Ambois, Act V. Sc. i. We find Shakespeare's Hamlet not

  in the action, not in any quotations that we might select, so much

  as in an unmistakable tone which is unmistakably not in the

  earlier play.

  The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by

  finding an 'objective correlative' ; in othu words, a set of objects,

  a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that

  particular emotion ; such that when the external facts, which must

  terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. If you examine any of Shakespeare's most successful tragedies, you will find this exact equivalence ; you will

  find that the state of mind of Lady Macbeth walking in her sleep

  has been communicated to you by a skilful accumulation of

  imagined sensory impressions ; the words of Macbeth on hearing

  of his wife's death strike us as if, given the sequence of events,

  these words were automatically released by the last event in the

  series. The artistic 'inevitability' lies in this complete adequacy of

  the external to the emotion ; and this is precisely what is deficient

  in Hamlet. Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which

  is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear.

  And the supposed identity of Hamlet with his author is genuine

  to this point : that Hamlet's bafflement at the absence of objective

  equivalent to his feelings is a prolongation of the bafflement of his

  creator in the face of his artistic problem. Hamlet is up against the

  difficulty that his disgust is occasioned by his mother, but that his

  mother is not an adequate equivalent for it; his disgust envelops

  and exceeds her. It is thus a feeling which he cannot understand ;

  he cannot objectify it, and it therefore remains to poison life and

  obstruct action. None of the possible actions can satisfy it ; and

  nothing that Shakespeare can do with the plot can express Hamlet

  for him. And it must be noticed that the very nature of the

  donnees of the problem precludes objective equivalence. To have

  heightened the criminality of Gertrude would have been to

  provide the formula for a totally different emotion in Hamlet ; it

  is just because her character is so negative and insignificant that

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  H A MLET

  she arouses in Hamlet the feeling which she is incapable of

  representing.

  The 'madness' of Hamlet lay to Shakespeare's hand ; in the

  earlier play a simple ruse, and to the end, we may presume, understood as a ruse by the audience. For Shakespeare it is less than madness and more than feigned. The levity of Hamlet, his

  repetition of phrase, his puns, are not part of a deliberate plan of

  dissimulation, but a form of emotional relief. In the character

  Hamlet it is the buffoonery of an emotion which can find no

  outlet in action ; in the dramatist it is the buffoonery of an

  emotion which he cannot express in art. The intense feeling,

  ecstatic or terrible, without an object or exceeding its object, is

  something which every person of sensibility has known ; it is

  doubtless a subject of study for pathologists. It often occurs in

  adolescence : the ordinary person puts these feelings to sleep, or

  trims down his feelings to fit the business worl d ; the artist keeps

  them alive by his ability to intensify the world to his emotions.

  The Hamlet of Lafargue is an adolescent ; the Hamlet of Shakespeare is not, he has not that explanation and excuse. We must simply admit that here Shakespeare tackled a problem which

  proved too much for him. Why he attempted it at all is an insoluble

  puzzle ; under compulsion of what experience he attempted to

  express the inexpressibly horrible, we cannot ever know. We need

  a great many facts in his biography ; and we should like to know

  whether, and when, and after or at the same time as what personal

  experience, he read Montaigne, I I . xii, Apologie de Raimond

  Sebond. We should have, finally, to know something which is by

  hypothesis unknowable, for we assume it to be an experience

  which, in the manner indicated, exceeded the facts. We should

  have to understand things which Shakespeare did not understand

  himself.

  49

  THE PERFECT CRITIC

  I

  'Eriger en lois ses impressions personne//es,

  c'est /e grand effort d'un lzomme s'il est sincere.'

  LETTRES A ' AMAZONE.

  Coleridge was perhaps the greatest of English critics, and in a

  sense the last. After Coleridge we have Matthew Arnold ; but

  Arnold - I think it will be conceded - was rather a propagandist

  for criticism than a critic, a popularizer rather than a creator of

  ideas. So long as this land remains an island (and we are no

  nearer the Continent than were Arnold's contemporaries) the

  work of Arnold will be important ; it is still a bridge across the

  Channel, and it will always have been good sense. Since Arnold's

  attempt to correct his countrymen, English criticism has followed

  two directions. When a distinguished critic observed recently, in

  a newspaper article, that 'poetry is the most highly organized

  form of intellectual activity,' we were conscious that we were

  reading neither Coleridge nor Arnold. Not only have the words

  'organized' and 'activity', occurring together in this phrase, that

  familiar vague suggestion of the scientific vocabulary which is

  characteristic of modern writing, but one asked questions which

  Coleridge and Arnold would not have permitted one to ask. How

  is it, for instance, that poetry is more 'highly organized' than

  astronomy, physics, or pure mathematics, which we imagine to

  be, in relation to the scientist who practises them, 'intellectual

  activity' of a pretty highly organized type ? 'Mere strings of

  words,' our critic continues with felicity and truth, 'flung like

  dabs of paint across a blank canvas, may awaken surprise . . . but

  have no significance whatever in the history of literature.' The

  phrases by which Arnold is best known may be inadequate, they

  may assemble more doubts than they dispel, but they usually

  have some meaning. And if a phrase like 'the most highly organized form of intellectual activity' is the highest organization of thought of which contemporary criticism, in a distinguished

  representative, is capable, then, we conclude, modern criticism

  i� degenerate.

  so

  THE PERFECT CR I T I C


  The verbal disease above noticed may b e reserved for diagnosis

  by and by. It is not a disease from which Mr. Arthur Symons (for

  the quotation was, of course, not from Mr. Symons) notably

  suffers. Mr. Symons represents the other tendency ; he is a

  representative of what is always called 'aesthetic criticism' or

  'impressionistic criticism'. And it is this form of criticism which

  I propose to examine at once. Mr. Symons, the critical successor

  of Pater, and partly of Swinburne (I fancy that the phrase 'sick

  or sorry' is the common property of all three), is the 'impressionistic critic'. He, if anyone, would be said to expose a sensitive and cultivated mind - cultivated, that is, by the accumulation of

  a considerable variety of impressions from all the arts and

  several languages - before an 'object' ; and his criticism, if anyone's, would be said to exhibit to us, like the plate, the faithful record of the impressions, more numerous or more refined than

  our own, upon a mind more sensitive than our own. A record, we

  observe, which is also an interpretation, a translation ; for it must

  itself impose impressions upon us, and these impressions are as

  much created as transmitted by the criticism. I do not say at once

  that this is Mr. Symons ; but it is the 'impressionistic' critic, and

  the impressionistic critic is supposed to be Mr. Symons.

  At hand is a volume which we may test. 1 Ten of these thirteen

  essays deal with single plays of Shakespeare, and it is therefore

  fair to take one of these ten as a specimen of the book :

  Antony and Cleopatra is the most wonderful, I think, of all Shakespeare's plays . . .

  and Mr. Symons reflects that Cleopatra is the most wonderful of

  all women :

  The queen who ends the dynasty of the Ptolemies has been the star

  of poets, a malign star shedding baleful light, from Horace and Propertius down to Victor Hugo ; and it is not to poets only . . .

  What, we ask, is this for ? as a page on Cleopatra, and on her

  possible origin in the dark lady of the Sonnets, unfolds itself.

  And we find, gradually, that this is not an essay on a work of art

  or a work of intellect ; but that Mr. Symons is living through the

  play as one might live it through in the theatre ; recounting,

  commenting :

  In her last days Cleopatra touches a certain elevation . . . she would

  die a thousand times, rather than live to be a mockery and a scorn in