Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot

by Frank Kermode

  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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  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

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  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,

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  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

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  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.

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  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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  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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  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