Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot

by Frank Kermode

  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

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  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,