It seems to me that Shakespeare achieved this at least in certain
scenes - even rather early, for there is the balcony scene of Romeo
and Juliet - and that this was what he was striving towards in his
late plays. To go as far in this direction as it is possible to go,
without losing that contact with the ordinary everyday world with
which drama must come to terms, seems to me the proper aim of
dramatic poetry. For it is ultimately the function of art, in imposing a credible order upon ordinary reality, and thereby eliciting some perception of an order in reality, to bring us to a condition of
serenity, stillness, and reconciliation ; and then leave us, as Virgil
left Dante, to proceed toward a region where that guide can avail
us no farther.
N O TE TO ' P O E T R Y A N D D RA M A '
As I explained i n my Preface, the passage i n this essay analysing
the first scene of Hamlet was taken from a lecture delivered some
years previously at Edinburgh University. From the same Edinburgh lecture I have extracted the following note on the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet :
In Romeo's beginning, there is still some artificiality :
Two of the .fairest stars in all the heaven,
Having some business, do intreat her eyes
To twinkle in their spheres till they return.
For it seems unlikely that a man standing below in the garden,
even on a very bright moonlight night, would see the eyes of the
lady above flashing so brilliantly as to justify such a comparison.
Yet one is aware, from the beginning of this scene, that there is a
musical pattern coming, as surprising in its kind as that in the
early work of Beethoven. The arrangement of voices - Juliet has
three single lines, followed by Romeo's three, four and five, followed by her longer speech - is very remarkable. In this pattern, one feels that it is Juliet's voice that has the leading part : to her
voice is assigned the dominant phrase of the whole duet :
My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep: the more I give to thee
The more I have, for both are infinite.
POETRY AND DRAMA
And to Juliet is given the key-word 'lightning', which occurs again
in the play, and is significant of the sudden and disastrous power
of her passion, when she says
'Tis like the lightning, which doth cease to be
Ere one can say 'it lightens'.
In this scene, Shakespeare achieves a perfection of verse which,
being perfection, neither he nor anyone else could excel - for this
particular purpose. The stiffness, the artificiality, the poetic
decoration, of his early verse has finally given place to a simplification to the language of natural speech, and this language of conversation again raised to great poetry, and to great poetry which is essentially dramatic : for the scene has a structure of which each
line is an essential part.
147
A P P R E C I AT I O N S O F I N D I V I D U A L A U T H O R S
Before 1918
from E ZRA POUND :
H I S METR I C AND POETRY
. . . Pound is not one of those poets who make no demands of the
reader ; and the casual reader of verse, disconcerted by the
difference between Pound's poetry and that on which his taste has
been trained, attributes his own difficulties to excessive scholarship on the part of the author. 'This', he will say of some of the poems in Proven«;:al form or on Proven«;:al subjects, 'is archaeology ;
it requires knowledge on the part of its reader, and true poetry
does not require such knowledge.' But to display knowledge is not
the same thing as to expect it on the part of the reader ; and of this
sort of pedantry Pound is quite free. He is, it is true, one of the
most learned of poets. In America he had taken up the study of
Romance Languages with the intention of teaching. After work in
Spain and Italy, after pursuing the Proven«;:al verb from Milan to
Freiburg, he deserted the thesis on Lope de Vega and the Ph.D.
and the professorial chair, and elected to remain in Europe. Mr.
Pound has spoken out his mind from time to time on the subject
of scholarship in American universities, its deadness, its isolation
from genuine appreciation, and the active creative life of literature. He has always been ready to battle against pedantry. As for his own learning, he has studied poetry carefully, and has made
use of his study in his own verse. Personae and Exultations show
his talent for turning his studies to account. He was supersaturated in Provence ; he had tramped over most of the country ; and the life of the courts where the Troubadours thronged was
part of his own life to him. Yet, though Personae and Exultations
do exact something from the reader, they do not require a knowledge of Proven«;:al or of Spanish or I tal ian. Very few people know the Arthurian legends well, or even Malory (if they did they might
realize that the Idylls of the King are hardly more important than
a parody, or a 'Chaucer retold for Children') ; but no one accuses
149
APPREC I AT I ONS O F I N D I V I D,!JAL AUTHORS · B EFORE 1 9 1 8
Tennyson of needing footnotes, or of superciliousness toward the
uninstructed. The difference is m�rely in what people are prepared for ; most readers could no more relate the myth of Atys correctly than they could give a biography of Bertrand de Born.
It is hardly too much to say that there is no poem in these
volumes of Mr. Pound which needs fuller explanation than he
gives himself. What the poems do require is a trained ear, or at
least the willingness to be trained.
The metres and the use of language are unfamiliar. There are
certain traces of modern influence. We cannot agree with Mr.
Scott James that among these are 'W. E. Henley, Kipling, Chatterton, and especially Walt Whitman' - least of all Walt Whitman.
Probably there are only two : Yeats and Browning. Yeats in 'La
Fraisne', in Personae, for instance, in the attitude and somewhat
in the vocabulary :
I wrapped my tears in an ellum leaf
And left them under a stone,
And now men call me mad because I have thrown
All folly from me, putting it aside
To leave the old barren ways of men . . .
For Browning, Mr. Pound has always professed strong admiration (see 'Mesmerism' in Personae) ; there are traces of him in
'Cino' and 'Farnam Librosque Cano', in the same volume. But it
is more profitable to comment upon the variety of metres and the
original use of language.
Ezra Pound has been fathered with vers libre in English, with
all its vices and virtues. The term is a loose one - any verse is
called 'free' by people whose ears are not accustomed to it - in
the second place, Pound's use of this medium has shown the
temperance of the artist, and his belief in it as a vehicle is not
that of the fanatic. He has said himself that when one has the
proper material for a sonnet, one should use the sonnet form ; but
that it happens very rarely to any poet to find himself in possession
of just the block of stuff which can perfectly be modelled into the
sonnet. It is true that up to very recently it was impossible to get
free verse printed in any periodical except those in which Pound
had influence ; and that now it is
possible to print free verse
(second, third or tenth-rate) in almost any American magazine.
Who is responsible for the bad free verse is a question of no
importance, inasmuch as its authors would have written bad verse
in any form ; Pound has at least the right to be judged by the
success or failure of his own. Pound's vers libre is such as is only
possible for a poet who has worked tirelessly with rigid forms and
different systems of metric . . . .
1 50.
from HENRY JAMES
. . . He was a critic who preyed not upon ideas, but upon living
beings. It is criticism which is in a very high sense creative. The
characters, the best of them, are each a distinct success of creation :
Daisy Miller's small brother is one of these. Done in a clean, flat
drawing, each is extracted out of a reality of its own, substantia!
enough ; everything given is true for that individual ; but what is
given is chosen with great art for its place in a general scheme.
The general scheme is not one character, nor a group of characters
in a plot or merely in a crowd. The focus is a situation, a relation,
an atmosphere, to which the characters pay tribute, but being
allowed to give only what the writer wants. The real hero, in any
of James's stories, is a social entity of which men and women are
constituents. It is, in The Europeans, that particular conjunction
of people at the Wentworth house, a situation in which several
memorable scenes are merely timeless parts, only occurring
necessarily in succession. In this aspect, you can say that James is
dramatic ; as what Pinero and Mr. Jones used to do for a large
public, James does for the intelligent. It is in the chemistry of
these subtle substances, these curious precipitates and explosive
gases which are suddenly formed by the contact of mind with
mind, that James is unequalled. Compared with James's, other
novelists' characters seem to be only accidentally in the same
book. Naturally, there is something terrible, as disconcerting as a
quicksand, in this discovery, though it only becomes absolutely
dominant in such stories as The Turn of the Screw. It is partly
foretold in Hawthorne, but James carried it much farther. And it
makes the reader, as well as the personae, uneasily the victim of a
merciless clairvoyance.
James's critical genius comes out most tellingly in his mastery
over, his baffling escape from, Ideas ; a mastery and an escape
which are perhaps the last test of a superior intelligence. He had
a mind so fine that no idea could violate it. Englishmen, with their
uncritical admiration {in the present age) for France, like to refer
to France as the Home of Ideas ; a phrase which, if we could twist
it into truth, or at least a compliment, ought to mean that in
ISI
A P P R EC I A T I O N S O F I N D I V IDUAL AUTHORS
BEFORE 1 9 1 8
•
France ideas are very severely looked after ; not allowed to stray,
but preserved for the inspection of civic pride in a Jardin des
Plantes, and frugally dispatched on· occasions of public necessity.
England, on the other hand, if it is not the Home of Ideas, has at
least become infested with them in about the space of time within
which Australia has been overrun by rabbits. In England ideas run
wild and pasture on the emotions ; instead of thinking with our
feelings (a very different thing) we corrupt our feelings with ideas ;
we produce the political, the emotional idea, evading sensation
and thought. George Meredith (the disciple of Carlyle) was fertile
in ideas ; his epigrams are a facile substitute for observation and
inference. Mr. Chesterton's brain swarms with ideas ; I see no
evidence that it thinks. James in his novels is like the best French
critics in maintaining a point of view, a viewpoint untouched by the
parasite idea. He is the most intelligent man of his generation . . . .
A P P R E CIAT I O N S O F I N D I V I D UA L AUT H O R S
1918-1 930
from P H I L I P MAS S I NGE R
. . . We must employ Mr. Cruickshank's judgments ; and perhaps
the most important judgment to which he has committed himself
is this :
'Massinger, in his grasp of stagecraft, his flexible metre, his
desire in the sphere of ethics to exploit both vice and virtue, is
typical of an age which had much culture, but which, without
being exactly corrupt, lacked moral fibre.'
Here, in fact, is our text : to elucidate this sentence would be to
account for Massinger. We begin vaguely with good taste, by a
recognition that Massinger is inferior : can we trace this inferiority,
dissolve it, and .have left any element of merit ?
We turn first to the parallel quotations from Massinger and
Shakespeare collocated by Mr. Cruickshank to make manifest
Massinger's indebtedness. One of the surest of tests is the way in
which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate ; mature poets
steal ; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it
into something better, or at least something different. The good
poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly
different from that from which it was torn ; the bad poet throws it
into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually
borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or
diverse in interest. Chapman borrowed from Seneca ; Shakespeare and Webster from Montaigne. The two great followers of Shakespeare, Webster and Tourneur, in their mature work do not
borrow from him ; he is too close to them to be of use to them in
this way. Massinger, as Mr. Cruickshank shows, borrows from
Shakespeare a good deal. Let us profit by some of the quotations
with which he has provided us :
Can I call back yesterday, with all their aids
That bow unto my sceptre ? or restore
153
APPREC I A T I ONS O F I N D I V I DUAL AUTHORS
1 9 1 8- 1 9 3 0
•
My mind to that trmiquillity and peace
It then enjoyed ?
MASS I N G E R
Not poppy, nor mandragora,
Nor all the drowsy syrops of the world
Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep
Which thou owedst yesterday.
SHAK ESPEA R E
Massinger's is a general rhetorical question, the language just and
pure, but colourless. Shakespeare's has particular significance ;
and the adjective 'drowsy' and the verb 'medicine' infuse a precise
vigour. This is, on Massinger's part, an echo, rather than an
imitation or a plagiarism - the basest, because least conscious
form of borrowing. 'Drowsy syrop' is a condensation of meaning
frequent in Shakespeare, but rare in Massinger.
Thou didst not borrow of Vice her indirect,
Crooked, and abject means.
MASS I N G E R
God knows, my son,
.
By what by-paths and indirect crook'd ways
I met this crown.
S H A K ES P E A R E
Here, again, Massinger gives the general forensic statement,
Sha
kespeare the particular image. 'Indirect crook'd' is forceful in
Shakespeare ; a mere pleonasm in Massinger. 'Crook'd ways' is a
metaphor ; Massinger's phrase only the ghost of a metaphor.
And now, in the evening,
When thou should'st pass with honour to thy rest,
Wilt thou fall /ike a meteor ?
MASS I N G E R
I shall fall
Like a bright exhalation in the evening,
And no man see me more.
S H A K E S P E A R E
Here the lines of Massinger have their own beauty. Still, a 'bright
exhalation' appears to the eye and makes us catch our breath in
the evening; 'meteor' is a dim simile; the word is worn.
1 54
P H I L I P MASS I N G ER
What you deliver to me shall be lock'd up
In a strong cabinet, of which you yourself
Shall keep the key.
M ASS I N G E R
'Tis in my memory locked,
And you yourself shall keep the key of it.
S HA K ESPEA R E
In the preceding passage Massinger had squeezed his simile to
death, here he drags it round the city at his heels ; and how swift
Shakespeare's figure is ! We may add two more passages, not given
by our commentator ; here the model is Webster. They occur on
the same page, an artless confession.
Here he comes,
His·nose held up; he hath something in the wind,
is hardly comparable to 'the Cardinal lifts up his nose like a foul
porpoise before a storm', and when we come upon
as tann' d galley-slaves
Pay such as do redeem them from the oar
it is unnecessary to turn up the great lines in the Duchess of Malfy.
Massinger fancied this galley-slave ; for he comes with his oar
again in the Bondman :
Never did galley-slave shake off his chains,
Or looked on his redemption from the oar . . . .
Now these are mature plays ; and the Roman Actor (from which
we have drawn the two previous extracts) is said to have been
the preferred play of its author.
We may conclude directly from these quotations that Massinger's feeling for language had outstripped his feeling for things ; that his eye and his vocabulary were not in co-operation. One of
the greatest distinctions of several of his elder contemporaries -
we name Middleton, Webster, Tourneur - is a gift for combining,
Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot Page 22