a people will be latent, if not all revealed ; and that it can only
appear in a language such that its whole genius can be present at
once. We must accordingly add, to our list of characteristics of the
classic, that of wmprehmsiveuess. The classic must, within its
formal limitations, express the maximum possible of the whole
range of feeling which represents the character of the people who
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ESSAYS OF GENERALI ZATION
1 9 3 0- 1 9 65
·
speak that language. It will represent this at its best, and it will
also have the widest appeal : among the people to which it belongs,
it will find its response among all classes and conditions of men.
When a work of literature has, beyond this comprehensiveness
in relation to its ovn language, an equal significance in relation to
a number of foreign literatures, we may say that it has also
universality. We may for instance speak justly enough of the
poetry of Goethe as constituting a classic, because of the place
which it occupies in its own language and literature. Yet, because
of its partiality, of the impermanence of some of its content, and
the germanism of the sensibility ; because Goethe appears, to a
foreign eye, limited by his age, by his language, and by his culture,
so that he is unrepresentative of the whole European tradition,
and, like our own nineteenth-century authors, a little provincial,
we cannot call him a universal classic. He is a universal author, in
the sense that he is an author with whose works every European
ought to be acquainted : but that is a different thing. Nor, on one
count or another, can we expect to find the proximate approach
to the classic in any modern language. It is necessary to go to the
two dead languages : it is important that they are dead, because
through their death we have come into our inheritance - the fact
that they are dead would in itself give them no value, apart from
the fact that all the peoples of Europe are their beneficiaries. And
of all the great poets of Greece and Rome, I think that it is to
Virgil that we owe the most for our standard of the classic : which,
I will repeat, is not the same thing as pretending that he is the
greatest, or the one to whom we are in every way the most indebted - it is of a particular debt that I speak. His comprehensiveness, his peculiar kind of comprehensiveness, is due to the unique position in our history of the Roman Empire and the
Latin language ; a position which may be said to conform to its
destiny. This sense of destiny comes to consciousness in the
Aeneid. Aeneas is himself, from first to last, a 'man in fate', a man
who is neither an adventurer nor a schemer, neither a vagabond
nor a careerist, a man fulfilling his destiny, not under compulsion
or arbitrary decree, and certainly from no stimulus to glory, but
by surrendering his will to a higher power behind the gods who
would thwart or direct him. He would have preferred to stop in
Troy, but he becomes an exile, and something greater and more
significant than any exile ; he is exiled for a purpose greater than
he can know, but which he recognizes ; and he is not, in a human
sense, a happy or successful man. But he is the symbol of Rome ;
and, as Aeneas is to Rome, so is ancient Rome to Europe. Thus
Virgil acquires the centrality of the unique classic ; he is at the
centre of European civilization, in a position which no other poet
1 28
WHAT I S A CLASS I C ?
can share or usurp. The Roman Empire and the Latin language
were not any empire and any language, but an empire and a
language with a unique destiny in relation to ourselves ; and the
poet in whom that Empire and that language came to consciousness and expression is a poet of unique destiny.
If Virgil is thus the consciousness of Rome and the supreme
voice of her language, he must have a significance for us which
cannot be expressed wholly in terms of literary appreciation and
criticism. Yet, adhering to the problems of literature, or to the
terms of literature in dealing with life, we may be allowed to imply
more than we state. The value of Virgil to us, in literary terms, is
in providing us with a criterion. We may, as I have said, have
reasons to rejoice that this criterion is provided by a poet writing
in a different language from our own : but that is not a reason for
rejecting the criterion. To preserve the classical standard, and to
measure every individual work of literature by it, is to see that,
while our literature as a whole may contain everything, every
single work in it may be defective in something. This may be a
necessary defect, a defect without which some quality present
would be lacking : but we must see it as a defect, at the same time
that we see it as a necessity. In the absence of this standard of
which I speak, a standard we cannot keep clearly before us if we
rely on our own literature alone, we tend, first to admire works of
genius for the wrong reasons - as we extol Blake for his philosophy,
and Hopkins for his style : and from this we proceed to greater
error, to giving the second-rate equal rank with the first-rate. In
short, without the constant application of the classical measure,
which we owe to Virgil more than to any other one poet, we tend
to become provincial.
By 'provincial' I mean here something more than I find in the
dictionary definitions. I mean more, for instance, than 'wanting
the culture or polish of the capital', though, certainly, Virgil was
of the Capital, to a degree which makes any later poet of equal
stature look a little provincial ; and I mean more that 'narrow in
thought, in culture, in creed' - a slippery definition this, for, from
a modern liberal point of view, Dante was 'narrow in thought, in
culture, in creed', yet it may be the Broad Churchman, rather
than the Narrow Churchman, who is the more provincial. I mean
also a distortion of values, the exclusion of some, the exaggeration
of others, which springs, not from lack of wide geographical
perambulation, but from applying standards acquired within a
limited area, to the whole of human experience ; which confounds
the contingent with the essential, the ephemeral with the permanent. In our age, when men seem more than ever prone to confuse wisdom with knowledge, and knowledge with information,
1 29
ESSAYS OF GENERAL�ZATION
1 9 3 0- 1 96 5
•
and to try to solve problems of life in terms of engineering, there
is coming into existence a new kinp of provincialism which perhaps deserves a new name. It is a provincialism, not of space, but of time ; one for which history is merely the chronicle of human
devices which have served their turn and been scrapped, one for
which the world is the property solely of the living, a property in
which the dead hold no shares. The menace of this kind of
provincialism is, that we can all, all the peoples on the globe, be
provincials together ; and those who are not content to be provincials, can only become hermits. If this kind of provincialism le
d to greater tolerance, in the sense of forbearance, there might be
more to be said for it ; but it seems more likely to lead to our
becoming indifferent, in matters where we ought to maintain a
distinctive dogma or standard, and to our becoming intolerant, in
matters which might be left to local or personal preference. We
may have as many varieties of religion as we like, provided we all
send our children to the same schools. But my concern here is
only with the corrective to provincialism in literature. We need
to remind ourselves that, as Europe is a whole (and still, in its
progressive mutilation and disfigurement, the organism out of
which any greater world harmony must develop}, so European
literature is a whole, the several members of which cannot flourish,
if the same blood-stream does not circulate throughout the whole
body. The blood-stream of European literature is Latin and
Greek - not as two systems of circulation, but one, for it is
through Rome that our parentage in Greece must be traced. What
common measure of excellence have we in literature, among our
several languages, which is not the classical measure ? What
mutual intelligibility can we hope to preserve, except in our common heritage of thought and feeling in those two languages, for the understanding of which, no European people is in any position
of advantage over any other ? No modern language could aspire
to the universality of Latin, even though it came to be spoken by
millions more than ever spoke Latin, and even though it came to
be the universal means of communication between peoples of all
tongues and cultures. No modern language can hope to produce a
classic, in the sense in which I have called Virgil a classic. Our
classic, the classic of all Europe, is Virgil.
In our several literatures, we have much wealth of which to
boast, to which Latin has nothing to compare ; but each literature
has its greatness, not in isolation, but because of its place in a larger
pattern, a pattern set in Rome. I have spoken of the new seriousness - gravity I might say - the new insight into history, illustrated by the dedication of Aeneas to Rome, to a future far beyond his living achievement. His reward was hardly more than a narrow
1 3<?
WHAT I S A CLASSI C ?
beachhead and a political marriage in a weary middle age : his
youth interred, its shadow moving with the shades the other side
of Cumae. And so, I said, one envisages the destiny of ancient
Rome. So we may think of Roman literature : at first sight, a
literature of limited scope, with a poor muster of great names, yet
universal as no other literature can be ; a literature unconsciously
sacrificing, in compliance to its destiny in Europe, the opulence
and variety of later tongues, to produce, for us, the classic. It is
sufficient that this standard should have been established once for
all ; the task does not have to be done again. But the maintenance
of the standard is the price of our freedom, the defence of freedom
against chaos. We may remind ourselves of this obligation, by our
annual observance of piety towards the great ghost who guided
Dante's pilgrimage : who, as it was his function to lead Dante
towards a vision he could never himself enjoy, led Europe towards
the Christian culture which he could never know ; and who,
speaking his final words in the new I tal ian speech, said in
farewell
il temporal foco e l'eterno
veduto hai, figlio, e sei venuto in parte
dov' io per me piu oltre non discerno.
Son, the temporal fire and the eternal, hast thou seen, and art come to
a place where I, of myself, discern no further.
1 3 1
POETRY AND DRAMA1
I
Reviewing my critical output for the last thirty-odd years, I am
surprised to find how constantly I have returned to the drama,
whether by examining the work of the contemporaries of Shakespeare, or by reflecting on the possibilities of the future. It may even be that people are weary of hearing me on this subject. But,
while I find that I have been composing variations on this theme
all my life, my views have been continually modified and renewed
by increasing experience ; so that I am impelled to take stock of the
situation afresh at every stage of my own experimentation.
As I have gradually learned more about the problems of poetic
drama, and the conditions which it must fulfil if it is to justify
itself, I have made a little clearer to myself, not only my own
reasons for wanting to write in this form, but the more general
reasons for wanting to see it restored to its place. And I think that
if I say something about these problems and conditions, it should
make clearer to other people whether and if so why poetic drama
has anything potentially to offer the playgoer, that prose drama
cannot. For I start with the assumption that if poetry is merely a
decoration, an added embellishment, if it merely gives people of
literary tastes the pleasure of listening to poetry at the same time
that they are witnessing a play, then it is superfluous. It must
justify itself dramatically, and not merely be fine poetry shaped
into a dramatic form. From this it follows that no play should be
written in verse for which prose is dramatically adequate. And
from this it follows, again, that the audience, its attention held by
the dramatic action, its emotions stirred by the situation between
the characters, should be too intent upon the play to be wholly
conscious of the medium.
Whether we use prose or verse on the stage, they are both but
means to an end. The difference, from one point of view, is not so
great as we might think. In those prose plays which survive, which
1 The first Theodore Spencer Memorial Lecture delivered at Harvard University and published by Faber & Faber and by the Harvard University Press in 195 1 .
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P OETRY AND DRAMA
are read and produced on the stage by later generations, the prose
in which the characters speak is as remote, for the best part, from
the vocabulary, syntax, and rhythm of our ordinary speech -
with its fumbling for words, its constant recourse to approximation, its disorder, and its unfinished sentences - as verse is. Like verse, it has been written, and rewritten. Our two greatest prose
stylists in the drama - apart from Shakespeare and the other
Elizabethans who mixed prose and verse in the same play - are, I
believe, Congreve and Bernard Shaw. A speech by a character of
Congreve or of Shaw has - however clearly the characters may he
differentiated - that unmistakable personal rhythm which is the
mark of a prose style, and of which only the most accomplished
conversationalists - who are for that matter usually monologuists - show any trace in their talk. We have all heard (too often !) of Moliere's character who expressed surprise when told
that he spoke prose. But it was M. Jourdain who was right, and
not his mentor or his creator : he did not speak prose - he only
talked. For I mean to draw a triple distinction : between prose, and
verse, and our ordinary speech which is mostly below the level of
>
either verse or prose. So if you look at it in this way, it will appear
that prose, on the stage, is as artificial as verse : or alternatively,
that verse can be as natural as prose.
But while the sensitive member of the audience will appreciate,
when he hears fine prose spoken in a play, that this is something
better than ordinary conversation, he does not regard it as a
wholly different language from that which he himself speaks, for
that would interpose a barrer between himself and the imaginary
characters on the stage. Too many people, on the other hand,
approach a play which they know to be in verse, with the consciousness of the difference. It is unfortunate when they are repelled by verse, but can also be deplorable when they are attracted by it -
if that means that they are prepared to enjoy the play and the
language of the play as two separate things. The chief effect of
style and rhythm in dramatic speech, whether in prose or verse,
should be unconscious.
From this it follows that a mixture of prose and verse in the
same play is generally to be avoided : each transition makes the
auditor aware, with a jolt, of the medium. It is, we may say, justifiable when the author wishes to produce this jolt : when, that is, he wishes to transport the audience violently from one plane of
reality to another. I suspect that this kind of transition was easily
acceptable to an Elizabethan audience, to whose ears both prose
and verse came naturally ; who liked high-falutin and low comedy
in the same play ; and to whom it seemed perhaps proper that the
more humble and rustic characters should speak in a homely
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ESSAYS OF GENERALJ ZA T I ON
1 93 0- 1 9 6 5
'
language, and that those of more exalted rank should rant in verse.
But even in the plays of Shakespeare some of the prose passages
seem to be designed for an effect of contrast which, when achieved,
is something that can never become old-fashioned. The knocking
at the gate in Macbeth is an example that comes to everyone's
mind ; but it has long seemed to me that the alternation of scenes
in prose with scenes in verse in Henry IV points an ironic contrast
between the world of high politics and the world of common life.
The audience probably thought they were getting their accustomed chronicle play garnished with amusing scenes of low life ; yet the prose scenes of both Part I and Part I I provide a sardonic
Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot Page 19